Quicker, faster deployment and highly efficient support is what every user of technology demands. Many solutions are not made for the cloud, but there are solutions to employ cloud in these solutions too. When assessing a suitable cloud solution to transform your technology solution to suite business needs, often you are curbed by the financial constraints, looking at the short term benefits and overlooking the long term ones.
If you are looking for a quick solution that can effectively bring in cloud capabilities without really changing much of development or operational procedures, then this solution will not be very effective long term, primarily because this would lead to an additional development cycle to incorporate cloud capabilities, which were added as an after thought.
Before moving to the cloud
If you are looking to move your technology solution to a cloud platform, there are some basic facts that are to be understood to realize the true benefits of the cloud.
- Consider a methodology to bring the development and operations factions together. Look to automate deployment processes so that a cause for human error can be considerably reduced. A system that is monitored and backed up to ensure reliability and business continuity. There also needs to be a process in place for allocation of new infrastructure resources as the system load increases. This can also be achieved by a managed Infrastructure Service provider who can help set up and automate tasks and processes as per industry standards
- Assess your solution architecture for scalability and flexibility. Moving to the cloud entails deploying your application on commodity hardware helping customers reduce costs and enabling scaling as required. Looking to transfer your current infrastructure setup onto the cloud provider’s setup might not be the best solution always. Applications which are developed with an in-house ideology might not have strong security features inbuilt. These are the biggest need for cloud based applications.
- Understand the leverage provided by using robust application programming interfaces or APIs. The APIs provided in solution stacks and cloud solutions are different and a solution needs to be designed employing these APIs as best suited to the application in question. Managing, maintaining and monitoring the complete infrastructure setup can be achieved through APIs on the cloud, which can be set up by a competent Infrastructure Service Provider. Use of APIs is beneficial as they allow for automating of scale up processes on demand.
The above three thoughts are usually the ones which might also prevent a new user from moving to the cloud. They require changes in the existing infrastructure and architectural set up, which can be time consuming and requiring a fair bit of project planning. But, in the long run, an application which has been built to draw on the specifics of the cloud is bound to do better in the years to come.
Nalashaa offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution to host and manage your cloud infrastructure with services including monitoring, security, backup and archiving. We also work with you from onset to assess, compare and implement a complete cloud technology solution based on specific business requirements.
