Ask the IT Pro: Rackspace’s Toby Owens on Cloud Migration

Grazed from Datamation. Author: James McGuire.

As the Head of Technical Strategy for Rackspace International, Toby Owen is responsible for ensuring the organization has the technical capabilities to cover current and future roadmap commitments, and leading the technical go-to-market strategy for new International markets. In this interview, we spoke about the most common issues companies deal with as they migrate to the cloud, including choosing a vendor and understanding the importance of service agreements.

1) When a company looks for a cloud computing vendor, what are some key questions they should ask?

One item to understand is whether your cloud vendor has a complete set of features. Everyone has virtualized servers (aka compute), but what about database services? Load balancers? Deployment automation capabilities? Do ALL the services have API access. In other words, will they work well in a fully automated deployment and management capability, where the application itself can participate in configuring the services to be used?…

Another item to consider is portability. Does your prospective cloud hoster use proprietary technology, which will make it difficult to move your application elsewhere if things don’t work out? Or do they support a standard where that application would be easier to move if needed?…

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