The good news for you is that every IT vendor out there is delivering products or services to meet this growing Cloud interest. And the bad news is... every IT vendor out there is delivering products or services to meet this growing Cloud interest. Many are the same products that were last year's "Green IT" solutions. Some are enterprise-class utility computing products aimed at your data center. Some are public web-based services for SMBs.
I've been working now for some time on new External Cloud product efforts, and am seeing the potential confusion just in this one area of Cloud computing. So I thought I'd share a few tips I've picked up that may help you as you are considering new projects in "the Cloud".
- Like any outsourcing decision, start with projects and applications that are not mission-critical or performance-sensitive.
- Spend time to develop an architecture to address the linear scalability, parallel processing and distributed data aspects of cloud computing.
- Understand how your management, monitoring and policies will accommodate external storage and compute resources especially in terms of security, availability, utilization and compliance.
- Compare Cloud subscription costs with your burdened total costs of ownership -- Cloud should deliver savings for short-time horizon projects, where specialized admin staffing would otherwise be needed, and where large fixed investments may not be fully utilized.
- Stick to annual contracts especially as Infrastructure as a service will become commoditized over time.
- Expect that only a few leading ecosystems will emerge once the hype passes – choose your vendors carefully looking for a track record, customer references, a documented SLA and top quality infrastructure.
Good luck with your projects, and feel free to share what you're learning in the Cloud.
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