We’ve been talking a lot about The Cloud and IaaS this year. The cloud, and IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service), allow you to seamlessly expand your business at any point in time. It provides enhanced safety features, data capacity, and allows you to focus on IT for innovation. So now that you are considering IaaS for your business, how do you begin to migrate?
First things first, make sure you are comfortable making the migration. In order to fully embrace IaaS, you need to trust that it will work for your business. If you have any questions or concerns, bring them up with your provider or in-house IT department. Your IT provider should have no problem answering your questions and explaining what is happening. You need to be comfortable and understand IaaS in order to fully embrace the benefits. As a reminder here are a few of the benefits you can see with IaaS:
- Reduce complexity: Infrastructure components and management processes can be managed as units instead of one machine at a time
- Reduce costs: Maximizing resource utilization by pooling, automating operations processes, and using public cloud services where appropriate
- Deliver and scale IT services flexibly
Next you want to find the right cloud host. There are many different cloud providers you can choose. Each one comes with their own unique set of benefits and challenges. Choosing the right provider is important for how successful your IaaS will be. It’s important to note that even if you have your own in-house IT department, it can also be beneficial to work with a Managed IT Service provider. The provider can often provide recommendations and insight for how to best utilize IaaS that can be missed from internal personnel.
Here are a few key items to make sure your provider offers:
- On-demand scalability to keep applications running
- Snapshots to provide crash-consistent local and/or offline backup
- Available off-site backup and/or disaster recovery replication
- Very high availability without disruption due to maintenance/upgrades
The time has come to make the migration. Your IT provider or IT department will be responsible for taking your current IT environment into the cloud so you can utilize IaaS. The migration process should be well planned out to avoid minimal disruptions to your business. Here are some important steps to remember during migration:
- Know What You Have
Ensure you have an accurate inventory of applications and the servers that run them. Tackle this from both directions: Work from applications toward servers, and then move from servers to applications to see what was missed.
- Figure Out Security
The traditional approach to security — putting a firewall in front of a data center — doesn’t work for IaaS. Few providers will allow you to install a physical firewall, which means organizations will need to consider virtual firewalls, virtual private network concentrators, intrusion prevention systems and load balancers. Datasmith works tirelessly to make sure your business is protected and secure in an IaaS environment. - Standardize, Virtualize, Minimize
Just because you can have as many servers as you want in an IaaS environment – doesn’t mean you need all of them. Your provider or IT department will work to streamline your activity in an IaaS environment. This may mean making some adjustments as you go and periodically each year.
Datasmith has helped many clients make the switch to an IaaS environment. We encourage you to contact us with questions. If you have ever thought about moving to the cloud, it’s worth exploring how you can factor in the cloud to your 2017 budget and plans.
Article written using information from this article.
