A specific sets of skills are needed to carry out a successful transition to the cloud . |
Most organisations will want to hand over responsibility for areas where they do not have the skills in-house or cannot justify the cost of employing specialists , such as a storage system , back up management or security systems .
There are a multitude of cloud providers , with significant differences in the contractual terms and conditions , available SLAs and recompense if not met , the legal jurisdictions where data is held and data recovery terms . Remember , this is where your corporate data will be held to provide services which are fundamental to your business operations .
For most organisations , the optimum solution will be a hybrid of public cloud , managed cloud and in-house or private cloud . Products such as SalesForce , Google Apps and Microsoft 365 integrated into corporate desktops can be considered as hybrid cloud services , but they provide point applications and services only . Hybrid cloud is likely to be a staging point as organisations continue their cloud journey and services become more capable and resilient .
Systems should be designed so that they enable you to change route and perhaps adopt different platforms or alternative suppliers quickly and with minimum impact to existing services and still meet the desired end point , or to change the end point or include different way points within the journey .
When you are defining , running or buying services , you should make sure that the interfaces used are as standard as possible , eg . XML , SOAP , REST , SAML etc . It is worth noting that this is rarely in a vendor ’ s best interests . Smaller vendors may be better at developing services with standard interfaces , so it may be better to choose services from challenger vendors rather than from the very large vendors who may use proprietary interfaces .
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further element , your people , who are a more significant factor than a ‘ traditional ’ infrastructure migration . Simplistically , cloud services replace services running inside your data centres ; if you have teams of staff currently running or managing these services , they will perceive it is not that good for them , so you need to factor this in . This can be where outside expertise is invaluable , working with companies who have helped with these issues before .
Intermediation is the use of an experienced third party to assist an organisation at all stages of its journey . Services such as Fordway ’ s Cloud Intermediation Services take best practice from sources such as ITIL and SFIA , reference architectures from vendors such as Microsoft and Cisco Reference and ISO standards such as ISO27001 ( security ), ISO20000 ( Service Management ) and ISO23001 ( BCP ). We then add our well proven transformation , migration and service operations models , years of experience of doing this and deep technical knowledge to ensure you achieve the best possible result for your organisation .
Intermediation includes analysis , design , implementation , support and operations . Cloud is a fast changing environment and cost or performance efficiencies can be constantly achieved by switching service providers or solution models , eg . moving systems from IaaS to SaaS . Intermediation also ensures that the deliverables of the third party broker are well defined , standard and mobile , enabling another third party broker to take over the provisioning of services if required without reinventing the wheel .
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Figure 1 : An example of the make-up of a Fordway hybrid cloud service |
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requirements . You have defined what services are needed and now need to decide which can usefully be provided via cloud and how much work you want to do . If you choose Infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS ), you will still have to do a lot of the work ; Platform as a Service ( PaaS ), slightly less and Software as a Service ( SaaS ), not much , although you will still have to retain responsibility for ensuring that your cloud provider meets the agreed SLAs .
You may want to retain core business applications in-house , but move noncore or commodity services to the cloud .
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Transformation and intermediation
As with any platform change , moving to cloud is a migration project . This means it needs planning , dedicated resources , clearly defined and understood success criteria , a test plan and , if you do not have the skills in-house , external expertise to assist with the process . With cloud there is one
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