Top Things CIO's Should Consider When Moving To The Cloud

10/11/2009

By Tom Fisher, Vice President Cloud Computing, SuccessFactors

Documented concerns about running on Cloud

Infrastructure providers with the outages of EC2 and Gmail. Recommendation: Consider infrastructure augmentation as an entrée for today's Cloud. It's cheaper, it's reliable and it's a great place to start.

To address the concern of uptime and availability, Cloud Infrastructure providers are now leveraging technologies that throttle their use and better manage their capacity reducing and or eliminating the impact on others running within the same infrastructure -- reducing and eliminating downtime. Major providers are beginning to offer compelling service levels to assure skeptical CIO's that...

...they are focused on and deliver to a common set of metrics. The major providers of Systems Management capability (Computer Associates, IBM, etc.) are working to provide the CIO a 'common view' of their portfolio including those applications running in the Cloud.

As these capabilities are delivered there will be an ever increasing comfort with the Cloud as part of a traditional IT infrastructure. The reality is that the same disciplines of making an internal application highly available are also found in the major Cloud organisations. Just like any highly available IT shop, Cloud providers need to be questioned about their redundancy capabilities and their disaster recovery protocols. This will have the two-fold benefit of getting comfortable with the delivery mechanism your solution of choice uses and enabling your operations staff to get a peek behind the curtain of the provider.

Advice to the skeptical CIO: if you're going to experiment with the Cloud, don't jump right in on your own with a mission critical application. Enable your own development environments (which usually are an expensive CapEx proposition) for the Cloud and experiment with your development environments - if your providers of technology are... continued on page two >

 

 

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