As cloud computing becomes more pervasive and as companies move to the next generation of cloud services which bring the focus out of the back office and to the end user, the importance of understanding the organization's total application utilization and information architecture is exceedingly important. To deliver real value, these solutions must scale when needed and provide data and IP security and compliance, all within the limits of your existing budgets, personnel, and processes. What's more, the value of IT is now measured by the value it delivers to the entire business. When IT can meet business needs in real time and be ready before the business even knows what it needs, its value increases. Ensuring success in all of these areas begins with understanding what you have and then assessing which components should be moved to the cloud, left on premise or implemented as a hybrid solution.
Ultimately, the success of your cloud implementation has as much to do with your business partners as it does with you understanding your business and existing infrastructure. The right partner will get to know your business and do a granular audit of your implementation to make sure it's serving your customers and your business. A good partner will also make recommendations that help you meet business goals not just provide you with one more solution to manage. According to IDG, 34% of organizations want their vendors to find a way to simplify access to multiple cloud services before they can fully embrace cloud computing. Simplifying means that when you're ready to scale or add an additional application, you should not have to rethink your entire approach.
A comprehensive audit should include the following:
Performance
Ensuring a positive customer experience, whether those customers are internal or external is essential. Moving to the cloud can hold tremendous appeal in terms of making sure those experiences are consistent and predictable. Understanding estimated downtimes, maintenance windows and SLAs will be important in achieving those goals. If you've already got infrastructure in the cloud, revisit your contracts, so you fully understand what has been promised. You should also be able to, in your audit, identify the specific metrics surrounding uptime, latency, page load times, etc. These will give you a baseline for future reference and also help you to understand utilization. Too often, systems are setup based on general assumptions about resource requirements which don't reflect actual application utilization – this can mean paying for more than your organization actually needs.
Security
Data security is a critical component of any enterprise IT system. An audit here should identify and chinks in the armor of your existing solution or planned cloud solution. Be sure to identify weak points as they relate to destruction of data whether on purpose or accidentally, do applications provide opportunity for intrusions or denial of service attacks and finally do cloud based solutions provide adequate levels of authentication.
Regulatory compliance
Some industries have strong regulations that dictate key issues surrounding data handling, security and storage. If your business deals with the healthcare, financial services or government sectors, that fact should be a caution flag that you need to make sure you are in compliance. Identify each of the data centers that are in use, understand which applications are accessing data and who has access to those.
Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity
Today, almost every business reports some form of regular disruption to service which can lead to costly losses in time, customer service and sales. Disasters from power outages, floods and other weather-related events can disrupt your installations. Your challenge is determine how, during these events, your IT infrastructure can continue to be operational, at least partially and assess which critical systems should, for recovery and redundancy should be placed in the cloud.
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