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Preparing to move to the cloud

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Article from ADMIN 44/2018

By Udo Seidel

Because the cloud is ubiquitous, some companies think that outsourcing their business applications to Amazon, Google, and the like is a breeze. In fact, on the way, treacherous winds blow just off the beaten track.

If you believe the advertisements, it's easy to use the services of cloud providers like Amazon [1], Google [2], Microsoft [3], and others. At the same time, the marketing by these companies suggests that the way into the cloud is completely uncomplicated. In fact, moving to the cloud is often a multidimensional challenge. In this article, I highlight some of the hurdles and focus on the non-technical side.

Experts argue about what exactly the cloud is [4], but here, the cloud is understood to provide the capacity to store, transport, and process third-party data – or, in cloud jargon, storage, network, and compute.

Why Move?

Companies that want to move to the cloud should clarify a number of questions before making the switch. Among them: What problems relating to the local IT infrastructure do you expect the cloud to solve? What are the expectations? Which objectives should the change fulfill? Which criteria are important? Can these criteria be measured, and how is the measurement carried out? What happens if expectations are not fulfilled? What are the exit criteria? Moreover, few people think about an alternative in the event that cloud outsourcing does not work as desired.

A professional evaluation requires some research. Among other things, the myths of higher speed and greatly reduced costs in the cloud must be examined carefully – at least for your own use case. Expectations that broken business processes will magically repair themselves outside of your own IT infrastructure are bold at best, but probably misplaced.

I will take a look behind the scenes of a migration to the cloud from four perspectives to answer the question: Should I stay or should I

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