When your business sends its data and operations to the cloud, you will, once the migration completes, potentially have hundreds of business operations processed in the cloud each day. A poorly optimized cloud presence could end up costing your business dearly. This is why it’s important to be aware of the kinds of missteps that businesses often make in this area.
Not paying attention to your share of the responsibilities involved
When you make use of data storage on the cloud, both you and the service provider have responsibilities ensuring that your cloud presence is secure. Solutions providers usually offer clients specifics of what their responsibilities are, in their service level agreement. It’s important to take these responsibilities seriously, and plan to comply.
Failing to recognize the benefits of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud operations
Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments help make sure that your business isn’t locked into a relationship with a single cloud services provider who may not offer you all the technologies and features that you need. Businesses increasingly favor these environments; if your business hasn’t investigated these, you could be left behind. It’s important to research the advantages of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud alternatives, and to draw up a plan to exploit the possibilities open to you.
Not paying attention to where your data is stored
It can seem as if it shouldn’t matter where exactly a cloud services company chooses to warehouse your data, but in some cases, it really can. This is the reason that large providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) give customers the choice of several different locations.
To begin, where you choose to have your data stored can affect what it costs you. With AWS, for instance, storing your data at the default location chosen by the service for you only costs 12 cents a gigabyte; storing it at a data center in California, however, costs two cents more, and choosing to store it at a data center in South America can cost a further three cents.
Why would you choose a specific location? The answer is that going with a data center that is close to where most of your customers are reduces the latency they experience when they access your website or app. Even a delay amounting to an extra second in an online transaction can give your customers reason to abandon a purchase and click away, or it could mean the difference between a win or a loss to the customers of an online gaming service.
To other companies, where they choose to put their data can depend on the likelihood of their being investigated. Some companies fear that sensitive data stored in the U.S. could be subject to government prying under the USA Patriot Act.
If the location of your data could affect the way your business is run, it’s important to pay attention to where your cloud service runs its data centers.
Moving all your data to the cloud at the same time
Business data migration can be a huge, complicated undertaking, one that you don’t have much experience in. It is only inevitable that the big move from your local data storage to the cloud will involve hiccups and mess-ups. It’s important, then, to gain a little experience working with your non-essential data first, make all the mistakes that you need, learn from them, and only then move on to shifting your business-critical data to the cloud. Doing everything all at once can be a recipe for disaster.
Migrating workflows to the cloud willy-nilly
Cloud computing has become so capable over the past few years that you could conceivably take just about any business process to the cloud. This isn’t to be taken to mean that doing everything on the cloud is the most efficient way to operate, however.
Putting an application on the cloud, for example, could require greater computational capacity than your cloud services provider is willing to give you. You might need to move to a more expensive service tier to be able to run such applications.
Before you move specific workflows or data to the cloud environment, it would be a good idea to do a cost-and-benefit analysis to see if storing specific collections of data, applications and business processes locally could make for greater savings or efficiencies.
Neglecting to think about data deletion practices
When you store sensitive data locally, you’re able to decide when and how to destroy it for security reasons. You have the options of either using data destruction software, or physically breaking the hard drives up to destroy the data they contain. On the cloud, data can’t be permanently deleted in these conventional ways. If you do plan to place sensitive data on the cloud, it would make sense to talk to your cloud services provider about how to permanently delete that data. It would be a mistake to neglect to set out specific plans in this area.
Moving your business to the cloud can be an excellent idea for efficiency and cost savings, but you need to make sure that you do it right. Keeping these common mistakes in mind should help make the process smoother and error-free.
