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Fast Track or Train Wreck - Where's Your Cloud Infrastructure Heading?
Jun 10, 2014
You know where you want to go but how do you get there? Where exactly is 'there'? Do you need to get there quickly? Easily?
You know how it is… You’re standing at the train station staring up at the departure board knowing where you want to go but trying to decide whether to splurge on a first class ticket or slum it in third class so you arrive with enough money left over for a coffee and a sticky bun.
It's a bit like that when your destination is cloud, only with even more considerations.
How do you get there? Where exactly is 'there'? Do you need to get there quickly? Easily? Or can you take time on the more reliable scenic route?The fastest track to the cloud is of course to sign up to a cookie cutter 'as a service' option like Office 365, Amazon Web Services or Google Apps. These apparent 'cheap seats' take little time and thought but they often turn out to be quite restrictive.
What's more, they may not be right for your business. If it doesn't fit neatly into a standard definition it can end up costing you more, particularly if it doesn't match your exact destination or it takes a while for your users to catch up. In addition it's worth forecasting bandwidth costs too - emails to a person a short distance away may end up travelling via Asia so, with more than a few users, the carry-on luggage may mount up.
If disrupting your users is something you don't want to live with, the scenic route of small, incremental changes to destination private cloud may offer a more comfortable ride. It is logistically more challenging, so it is worth working closely with your systems integrator to plan your itinerary and avoid getting misdirected down a branch line.
Of course, just as you may not risk your elderly relatives on an arduous journey, so you may prefer to leave your legacy applications exactly where they are, peacefully ticking over in-house, while choosing the reliability and predictability of hybrid cloud for others. More often than not, this low stress approach is the least hazardous and offers the greatest opportunity to design your own timetable and route map.
For those facing the end of the line with existing infrastructure and systems, now is a great time to plan your journey. Talk to your tour guides at Team Computing to get on the right track.