Assessing your bandwidth needs will involve exploring a number of factors including how fast and how often you’ll want to access your data, the number of employees who’ll be doing it, and your organisation’s overall Internet consumption.
Just as important is how you think those demands are likely to magnify in coming years.
If there is a larger digital transformation in play, or you foresee a shift in customer expectations on how you service them, then your cloud solution needs to be structured to leave room for these growth projections.
You’ll need to ask yourself some searching questions about security. How important is it to you? The Public Cloud is convenient, affordable and scalable - an appealing trio of benefits.
But for organisations with critically important data such as IP or sensitive financial information, it may not offer the security, sovereignty and total control that a Private Cloud solution does.
So you might benefit from a Hybrid solution where your less sensitive data – eg, your website - is kept in the cost-effective Public Cloud and you only pay for a Private Cloud answer for that most vital of information. (We’ve found this to be a successful ‘best-of-both-worlds’ solution for many clients.)
What data would you put where? Is this an appropriate time to reconsider which data is truly critical to how you run your business? Both good questions to ask yourself.
There are likely to be numerous applications scattered across your business. Some can be easily deployed into the Cloud, but legacy applications may need rebuilding to be cloud ready and to take advantage of the cloud capabilities provided by the Platform as Service (PaaS) layer on which they will run.
Do all of those applications need to be migrated across, or is it time to rationalise what you have and enjoy some cost savings along the way?
What about your endpoint devices? Do all have the capability to connect and ‘play well’ with your new cloud-enabled infrastructure? If not, your investment in that infrastructure might never be fully realised with your end users and the devices they work on every day.
Finally it doesn’t hurt to question your habits and ingrained assumptions either, for example that the one server, one application model is fixed in stone. Virtualisation now enables a single server to function as multiple virtual machines, each operating in a different environment.
Consolidating multiple servers onto fewer physical devices will reduce your hardware and maintenance costs and even cut your energy bill.