Helping clients with cloud assessment, decision is a critical value-add
November 25, 2014
Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Stewart.
There seems to be every reason in the world to move applications into the cloud today, yet that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a rigorous approach to evaluating whether it’s the best fit for your client’s particular application and business. There are a few seminal factors that play into a cloud assessment and the decision to move a customer’s workload to a third-party cloud service.
The priority of these factors will differ from organization to organization. Culture and pre-established viewpoints will also affect decisions. The role of the value-added reseller (VAR) and implementation partner is to provide an objective filter for decision makers, and to evaluate the customer’s business and IT organization for cloud readiness…
1. The application profile: All roads lead from here. When cloud computing got its start in the business world, companies thought about hosting infrastructure. As cloud computing matured, so did the options, including the acceptance of hybrid environments. Now executives should evaluate individual applications and match them to the right environment. If there are stringent regulatory requirements, or if the application will store and share proprietary information, the customer may steer away from public cloud services. Yet there’s never a black-and-white scenario. Let’s say a pharmaceutical company has an application for sharing publicly available human genome data and running queries on it. Given the large data sets and the high compute needs, the cloud is a more economic and practical choice for hosting this application. Yet there may be a corporate policy dictating that the analysis of the data stay within corporate walls. Therefore, the pharmaceutical company may choose a hybrid infrastructure — cloud for the query application and on-premises for storing the analysis…
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