Tag Archives: planning

Five Questions Boards Of Directors Need To Ask About Cloud Governance

BOD-cloud-questionsThe many benefits of cloud computing include helping enterprises become more efficient, agile, innovative and flexible, but achieving those benefits depends on a number of factors, including the involvement of the board of directors. ISACA, a nonprofit, independent association of more than 100,000 governance, risk, security and assurance professionals worldwide, has issued new guidance outlining key questions for boards of directors to ask to ensure their enterprise’s cloud initiative is in line with business objectives and the organisation’s risk tolerance.

“Board members need a clear understanding of cloud computing benefits and how to maximise them through effective governance practices,” said Marc Vael, CISA, CISM, CGEIT, CISSP, an ISACA board member and chief IT audit executive at Smals.“This requires the board to see cloud computing not as an IT project, but rather as a business strategy.”

According to ISACA’s Cloud Governance: Questions Boards of Directors Need to Ask, boards should address the following five questions to determine the strategic value that cloud services are expected to provide and the impact that the cloud may have on resources and controls:

1. Do management teams have a plan for cloud computing? Have they weighed the value and opportunity costs?

2. How do current cloud plans support the enterprise’s mission?

3. Have executive teams systematically evaluated organisational readiness? For example, are the right skills available? Do cloud processes conflict with other established processes? Do cloud plans conflict with enterprise culture?

4. Have management teams considered what existing investments might be lost in their cloud planning? Does the adoption of a cloud service nullify already-made technology investments that have not reached their planned end date, and is that noted and approved?

5. Do management teams have strategies for measuring and tracking the value of cloud return vs. risk?

“The answers to these questions will help determine the enterprise’s readiness to adopt cloud computing and also help ensure that the necessary governance is in place,” said Vael. “The COBIT 5 framework for governance and management of IT can also help enterprises manage investments such as cloud services. COBIT 5 helps ensure consistent practices to maximise value and manage risk.”

ISACA’s white paper, “Cloud Governance: Questions Boards of Directors Need to Ask,” is available as a free download at www.isaca.org/cloud-governance. The COBIT 5 framework is a free download at www.isaca.org/cobit.

 

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The Keys to Enterprise Public Cloud

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Today’s Cloud Computing marketplace exhibits a surprising bifurcation. Public Cloud providers like Amazon.com are all the rage among small companies, startups, and individual developers. Enterprises, however, are largely investing in Private Clouds. Public Clouds are too risky, so the story goes, or perhaps enterprise decision makers are only willing to dip their toe in the Public Cloud water.

We find this trend surprising, because in many ways the Public Cloud value proposition is stronger than the Private Cloud’s, even for large organizations. The perceived security issues are largely FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), as Private Clouds are generally as susceptible to the same risks as public ones (if not more so). Building out a Private Cloud requires capital expense, eliminating the pay-as-you-go benefit that Public Cloud customers enjoy. And perhaps most striking, you must purchase excess server capacity to handle unexpected loads in a Private Cloud. What’s the point in having a Cloud in the first place if you can’t be elastic and save money at the same time?

The enterprise challenge Public Cloud providers have is telling the proper story at the proper time. If most enterprises are at the toe-in-the-water phase, then best to give them toe-in-the-water options, like Cloud storage, Cloud-based email, and self-contained Web sites running in the Cloud. Established Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings like Salesforce.com fall into this category as well. After all, if a Cloud Provider positions their value proposition to the enterprise too far ahead of where the customers are focusing, they may get a lot of smiles and nods in their meetings, but no purchase orders.

Be that as it may, many of today’s enterprises are ready to move forward with more strategic Cloud initiatives. What’s holding them back is a lack of solid information and expertise from the marketplace. Traditional software and hardware vendors are still the source of most of the information out there, and their advice emphasizes buying software and hardware, naturally. You can’t really blame them – that’s their business, after all-but from the enterprise practitioner’s perspective, there is a gap in the available information and expertise that Private Cloud providers are uniquely qualified to fill.

Marketing, of course, is only one side of the story. The Public Cloud providers must base their story on real capabilities that enterprises not only need today, but will require in the near future. Perhaps not ten years hence, but capabilities that organizations can include today in their strategic Cloud planning for the next few years. Many organizations are ready to move forward with their Cloud initiatives, and the Public Cloud providers can lead the way.

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The Good News About Cloud Architecture: Everything Fails

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Two recent events reminded us this spring that cloud computing infrastructures are vulnerable to the same genetic IT flaw that plagues traditional data center operations: everything fails, sooner or later.

The failure modes of cloud vs. traditional data center architectures may differ in nature and frequency, but the threat is the same – outages, downtime, lost revenues and damaged customer trust. Ironically, these same recent events also highlight how cloud infrastructures, when managed correctly, actually provide unprecedented capabilities to deliver high availability, resiliency, and business continuity in IT operations.

In March, a 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused widespread disruptions to power supplies and network connectivity to data centers across Japan, causing Japanese companies to rethink their traditional disaster recovery strategies. Several weeks later, the Elastic Block Storage system in one of Amazon’s data centers in the Eastern U.S. failed due to a faulty router upgrade and a cascade of resulting events, sending hundreds of customers – including many Web 2.0 companies such as FourSquare and Reddit – scrambling to resume services.

These events prove that, no matter how you slice it, neither public clouds nor private data centers constitute a magic bullet for all the needs of today’s dynamic businesses. In the case of the Amazon cloud, it may in fact have been its remarkable record of operational excellence that led some customers – despite Amazon’s constant reminders to “design for failure” – to assume that the inherent scalable, redundant and global nature of the cloud would protect them from having their systems go down. Well, lesson learned: it’s not just the presence of alternative cloud resource pools that matters, but the ability to fail over to them quickly and seamlessly that is critical to maintaining continuous operations.

Rethinking Disaster Recovery

Many companies in Japan have long emphasized and invested in maintaining business continuity as a key IT principle. They have also believed that the safest place for data center operations is inside the four walls of the corporation. However, the recent tragedy exposed the weakness of this strategy. A disaster that affects an entire region can take out a corporate data center just as easily as a nuclear power plant.

And the impact of the disaster has not ended. Power-plant disruptions continue to cause rolling blackouts that cut electricity to data centers throughout the country in three-hour increments. Backup generators fill the power gap, but the Japan Data Center Council recently warned that reliance on generators is causing a diesel fuel shortage. With more than 50 data centers in the Tokyo area alone, JDCC members are burning through 5,000 to 6,250 gallons of fuel every hour. Japanese corporate leaders have begun to realize they don’t want their businesses to be dependent on diesel fuel supplies for backup generators.

As a result, Japanese companies are rethinking business continuity, eschewing traditional disaster recovery architectures and looking to the cloud to provide a new level of redundancy, failure isolation and geographical diversity for their IT resources in a more cost-effective manner. Already, ZDNet Japan has reported on several new cloud deployments by private companies and government agencies as a direct result of the earthquake.

Just when cloud computing might have seemed like a welcome solution to disaster recovery planning in Japan, Amazon suffered a major outage that affected hundreds of customers. Like their counterparts in Japan, many of these companies had not prepared a ‘Plan B’ – instead relying on a single availability zone in a single region in the Amazon Web Services cloud. It appears that they either didn’t anticipate any outages at all, or that they expected that if one of Amazon’s zones went down, they’d somehow be able to easily move their systems to one of AWS’s other regions. For most, both strategies failed. Why? Because it’s not enough to have options during failure scenarios – you also need to have reliable failover procedures that have been tested and are quick to implement.

We all know the old business continuity clichés: be prepared, never put all your eggs in one basket. But we’re also human, which is why it’s understandable that so many companies were critically affected by the AWS outage. Many organizations weren’t preparing for failure as we all know we should. And it reminds us that organizations themselves must take ownership of their own business continuity strategies and cannot rely on any single infrastructure – whether public cloud or internal data center – to always be available.

Designing for Failure in the Cloud

The best way to protect your organization from unplanned downtime due to a natural disaster or human error has always been to implement redundancy and diversity in your disaster recovery and business continuity systems. This involves enabling your team to run business services on a number of different infrastructures – whether they be public clouds such as Amazon or Rackspace, or private clouds using traditional on-premise hardware – and fail over between them quickly and efficiently as necessary.

Despite the Amazon outage, the fact is that public clouds now provide organizations with an impressively wide array of options to implement business continuity at a level of affordability that simply did not exist a few years ago. Consider this: right now from my laptop I can launch servers in a dozen disparate locations worldwide – including the U.S., Europe, and Asia – for pennies per hour. As a result, I can design a system for my business that can quite reasonably withstand localized outages from just about any human error or natural disaster, and at a lower cost than previously possible.

The key is to design for failure. Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels has been preaching this religion for many years now, suggesting that the only way to test the true robustness of a system is to ‘pull the plug’. Netflix – itself a major cloud infrastructure user – has created a process they call the Chaos Monkey that randomly kills running server instances and services just to make sure that the overall system continues to operate well without them. And, not surprisingly, Netflix’s overall operation saw little impact from the AWS U.S. East outage when it occurred.

Implementing failure resilient systems is not easy. How can you quickly move your operations from one infrastructure to the next when the pressure is on and the alarm bells are ringing? How do you design a system that not only allows new compute resources to begin to operate as part of your service, but also folds in an up-to-date copy of the data your users and customers depend on?

There is, of course, no one-size-fits-all solution. But there is a general approach that does work – combining redundancy in design with automation in the cloud management layer. The first step requires architecting a solution that uses components that can withstand failures of individual nodes – whether those are servers, storage volumes or entire data centers. Each component (e.g. at the Web layer, application layer, data layer) needs to be considered independently, and designed with the realities of data center infrastructure and Internet bandwith, cost and performance in mind. Solutions for resilient design are almost as many and varied as are the software components they utilize.

But the secret sauce really comes in how your architecture is operated. What parts of the system can respond automatically to failure, what parts can respond nearly automatically, and which not at all? To be more specific, if a given cloud resource goes down – be it a disk drive, a server, a network switch, a SAN, or an entire geographical region – how seamlessly can you launch or fail over to another and keep operations running? Ideally, of course, the more that is automated (or nearly so), the better your operational excellence.

Achieving that level of automation requires that your system design and configuration be easily replicable. Servers, for example, need to be quickly re-deployable in a predictable fashion across different cloud infrastructures. It’s this automation that gives organizations the life-saving flexibility they need when crisis strikes.

The right cloud management solution should simplify the process of launching entire deployments through customizable best practices. It should also provide complete visibility into all infrastructures through a central management dashboard – a ‘single pane of glass’ – through which administrators can monitor performance and make capacity changes based on real-time needs. The same automation and control that gives organizations the ability to scale up or down using multiple servers when demand increases also allows them to migrate entire server deployments to a new infrastructure when disaster strikes.

The fallout from the Japanese earthquake and Amazon outage is being felt throughout the business community and is causing organizations to rethink how they ensure business continuity. Cloud architecture provides the distributed structures necessary to counteract regional disasters, but companies also need the cloud management capabilities necessary to fail over their operations to multiple infrastructures in a way that keeps things up and running.

Some may have thought that the cloud was a magic bullet. It’s not, and that’s actually good news. By recognizing one of the original founding principles of cloud architectures – that everything fails at some point – businesses are now in a position to design and build services that are more resilient than in the past, at a fraction of the cost. With the right architecture and management layer, cloud-based services can provide unparalleled disaster protection and business continuity.

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SMBs Stymied By Virtualization Backup

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While smaller companies may adopt virtual machines in greater numbers in 2011, they may not necessarily adapt their backup plans to match the changes in their environments.

That’s a problem, says backup and recovery vendor Acronis, which recently took a deeper dive into the data from its January study on small and midsize business (SMB) disaster preparedness. The report found that SMBs will increase their deployments of virtual servers in 2011, with adoption jumping from 22% to 33%.

“We realized that these SMB customers for the longest time have been putting their [disaster recovery] plans in place and backing up their data through their physical servers, and that’s where they focused,” said Seth Goodling, virtualization practice manager at Acronis, in an interview. “When the virtualization trend kicked off, and the server consolidation trend kicked off, all of a sudden they’re faced with another set of challenges. It’s not necessarily the best way to back up your virtual environments, the way you’ve backed up your physical environments in the past.”

Goodling points to higher confidence in the ability to recover from an IT disaster among SMBs that treat their virtualized environments with the same degree of importance as they do their physical systems. “It was the companies that didn’t put quite as much weight in their virtual environments that lacked confidence,” he said.

In some cases, it could a matter of process: More than 40% of U.S. respondents in the study said they don’t back up their virtual machines as often as their physical ones. That could be the result of tight resources or a lack of executive buy-in — or both — but whatever the reason, it makes good sense to have consistent backup policies across all environments. (And if you don’t have any recovery plan, there’s no time like the present.) Acronis advises SMBs to give equal importance to virtual machines in their backup plans, applying — and enforcing — the same policies that govern the company’s physical machines.

Awareness doesn’t seem to be the problem: 73% of the companies surveyed agreed that virtualization “has either completely or partially changed the way the business manages its backup and disaster recovery.” Rather, when costs and other factors motivate virtualization deployments, backup plans might take a backseat.

“All of a sudden, their SQL databases and their Exchange databases are being virtualized — that’s tier-one, mission-critical data for them,” Goodling said. “Going to a tape-based system might not be the quickest, fastest, and most accurate way to recover that data.”

So what’s an IT pro at a smaller company to do when stretched thin across a complex infrastructure?

“The first thing would be that single pane of glass — or a single solution that can manage and handle hybrid environments,” Goodling said. Acronis’ January survey found that the typical SMB had more than two backup systems when they were operating a mix of physical, virtual, and cloud systems. Some companies in the study had as many as five separate backup schemes, according to Goodling. Goodling’s second piece of advice for SMBs: Your backup plan should plan for growth.

“It has to be scalable. Small businesses are not virtualizing everything from day one,” Goodling said, noting that not planning for growth can add unnecessary backup and recovery costs down the line.

Acronis also recommends independent backups and frequent refreshes for each virtual machine, image-based backups, and agentless software for virtual servers that only requires a single agent per physical host.

Goodling believes that smaller companies sometimes move faster into new technologies without the extensive planning and testing that’s often ingrained in large enterprise rollouts, which can lead to insufficient disaster readiness.

“SMBs may tend to jump into some of these things a little quicker without as much research, without looking at all the steps that need to be done,” Goodling said. “They may be quickly virtualizing their environments, but they might not be as concerned about backing up those environments at the end of the day.”

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Removing the Mist Surrounding The Cloud

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Key factors that organisations must consider before moving across to a cloud computing model.

The hype surrounding cloud computing is expected to reach unprecedented levels over the next few years. According to recent research by analyst Gartner, CIOs view the cloud as their top technology priority for 2011 and it expects the number of organisations using on-demand computing to rise to 43% within four years.

Despite being lured by the prospect of achieving significant cost savings and efficiency gains, not all organisations are ready to embrace cloud computing and some lack an adequate contingency plan in the event of it all going wrong. Neil Cross, Managing Director of leading managing services and cloud computing provider, Advanced 365, says that businesses should consider the following key factors before seeking to introduce cloud computing as part of their IT strategy.

Determine what you want to achieve and why
IT is about delivering improved business services, not just on ensuring the smooth-running of technology, so make sure you understand what you want to achieve as an organisation and why. Both public and private cloud options should be thoroughly reviewed alongside non-cloud alternatives with the benefits and drawbacks of each being given fair consideration. Moving to cloud computing just because it’s the latest buzz in IT isn’t a good enough reason and your project is likely to fail.

Understand your business drivers as well as the IT drivers
The pressure to achieve efficiency savings may encourage more IT teams to look at moving to a cloud computing model. However, it’s essential that any changes made to IT infrastructure are suited to the needs of the business first rather than being modified to fit the IT department’s preferred cloud platform.

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail
It might seem obvious, but make sure you plan thoroughly and decide how your chosen cloud solution is going to be integrated, managed and monitored. Although it’s possible to access ‘on demand’ cloud services in a matter of minutes with the aid of a credit card, you should not become complacent about the level of planning that is required to ensure that your project is a success.

Reducing complexity is as important as reducing cost
Compared with managing your IT systems exclusively in-house, cloud computing may not be a cheaper option due to the additional costs of accessing cloud services on-demand and having to retrain your staff. Introducing a new cloud supplier to your business could also create more management complexity into your IT infrastructure if you’re uncertain as to how this supplier will be managed and how you are going to link your various applications together.

Think about the risks
Though cloud computing brings undoubted business benefits, organisations also need to consider carefully the potential risks. Is your data going to be held safely and securely on the cloud and are you satisfied that your cloud supplier is reliable and experienced enough to provide your business with the necessary service-level provision you require?

Choose the right partner
It is essential to work with specialist cloud partners that can manage their services in line with your organisation’s requirements. Check that your partner can provide you with an end-to-end service combining service level management, service desk facilities, remote monitoring, advanced reporting capabilities and complete data transparency to help minimise the risk of integrating your systems into the cloud. You should pay particular attention to whether your cloud provider’s service desks run 24/7 so that they can react quickly to keep downtime to a minimum.

Ensure your service level agreement is appropriate for your business
In the event of a business-critical application going down, you need to be reassured that your cloud provider has the expertise and skills to get it up-and-running again as quickly as possible. Ensure that your provider offers service level agreements (SLA’s) that are appropriate for your business which cover almost any eventuality. The most effective cloud partners can offer multiple SLA’s for a single customer giving the business peace-of-mind at all times.

The increase in acceptance towards cloud computing will undoubtedly lead to a surge in uptake as organisations continue to wrestle with having to make deep spending cuts. However despite the many advantages to be gained by embracing cloud applications, they do not represent a magic wand for organisations to solve existing business issues. It’s important to consider the move to cloud computing very carefully and ensure that your organisation is practically and culturally ready to gain the most from what the cloud has to offer.

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Microsoft Survey Highlights Cloud Movement Across the US

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Microsoft today named some of the country’s top “cloud-friendly” U.S. cities. The rankings are based on the results of an extensive survey in which 2,000 IT decision makers nationwide discussed how they are adopting and using cloud computing.

The forecast for cloud computing across key U.S. cities calls for new lines of business, more need for IT services, and potential job growth, according to a new survey released today by Microsoft.

Microsoft released the results of the study this week after interviewing more than 2,000 IT decision-makers in 10 U.S. cities.

The cities are ranked based on how local businesses are adopting and using cloud computing solutions – including hiring vendors to migrate to the cloud, seeking IT professionals with cloud computing experience, and creating new lines of business based on cloud platforms. The survey indicates that cloud computing is not only a growing sector of the IT services community, but helping to create new businesses and jobs locally.

“I think the study is incredibly interesting, and it shows business and IT growth is a key output of the cloud,” said Scott Woodgate, a director in Microsoft’s corporate account segment, which serves mid-market businesses. “For IT professionals, it’s clear that becoming skilled in the cloud is an important call to action. For businesses, the cloud really empowers growth. Because of the nature of the cloud, you can take more risks and innovate at a much lower cost.”

The survey, funded by Microsoft, was conducted online and targeted IT decision makers from various industries in 10 U.S. cities. Microsoft ranked the cities according to their “cloud-friendliness” based on a number of results, including opinions and attitudes about cloud computing.

The study shows that one of two things is happening in business – either companies are turning to outside experts to understand and implement the cloud, or they’re looking within their existing IT departments for help, Woodgate said.

“For example, almost two-thirds of enterprise IT decision makers have hired or are planning on hiring vendors to help understand and deploy the cloud,” Woodgate said. “And 21 percent of IT decision makers are looking to hire new staff with cloud experience.”

RDA Corporation in Baltimore is one of the many cloud consultants investing heavily in the technology – and it’s paying off.

CEO Tom Cole said his company, which does IT consulting, planning, strategy and integration, spent all of last year introducing the concept of cloud computing to its customers.

In just one year there has been a surge in interest in the cloud, he said. Last year his company decided to invest in the cloud and started talking to customers about it in a major way, and now companies are approaching RDA on their own asking for help moving to the cloud.

“Adoption is a two-pronged effort,” Cole said. “No. 1, understand what the technology is and its viability in the marketplace and, once you determine it is in fact viable, ensure that you’ve invested in the people and tools to learn the technology and be able to apply it. Secondly, you’ve got to invest in a field sales team and customers to be able to understand who the early adopters are, how they can take advantage of the cloud, and what the market will bear.”

Cole said his company is heavily invested in cloud computing, adding that it’s not hard to pitch Microsoft Azure – Microsoft’s cloud computing platform – as a solution. He said it’s quick and affordable to deploy; it’s easy to build, maintain, manage, and add devices; and it’s easy to build customized solutions that scale up and down when the need shifts.

From Microsoft’s perspective, Woodgate said, cloud computing has two other advantages: it lets small businesses act like big businesses, and it lets big businesses move quickly and cheaply like a small business by quickly scaling up and down in size as their IT needs shift.

“It works for small business adopters because they have limited IT staff but have similar desires to large-businesses in terms of productivity, running the business and satisfying customers,” he said. “For big businesses, there is an opportunity to innovate at a lower cost with multiple options rather than having to sink all of their chips into a single, big capital cost option.”

Some businesses still believe that cloud computing will mean job losses, based on new efficiencies gained by moving some IT services to the cloud. This belief, coupled with a shaky economy that wasn’t allowing for new IT projects, led to some reticence for businesses to adopt cloud computing more eagerly. However, the Microsoft survey shows that tide is turning.

The survey also showed that businesses still believe some misnomers about cloud computing – such as that it’s just a trend or a fad.

“People often compare cloud computing to outsourcing. I don’t think it compares well,” Woodgate said. “The skill set of IT workers is changing, and there is plenty of opportunity for IT directly in the context of the cloud. Also, the value proposition of IT is changing. They currently spend a lot of time keeping the lights on. I think with the cloud, they’ll be able to spend less time on that and more time on moving the overall business forward.”

Cole said any talk of cloud computing contributing to job loss is “totally fictitious.”

“It does not drive people out of work. If anything, it creates business opportunities to add different value and lowers the cost of optimizing your infrastructure,” Cole said. “The planning, deployment, migration and support opportunities in the area of new venture startup are a tremendous way – at a low risk – to start something new, which means new jobs.”

Whenever there is a seismic shift in an industry, like cloud computing is for the IT industry, the changes may mean job shifting, Woodgate said. But in the long term, it will mean more jobs and higher-value IT jobs – such as creating new services for end users.

“With these changes, it takes time to get people’s skills up, it takes time to understand the cloud and evaluate how it can help you, execute your first project and then build on that success” Woodgate said. “Certainly the infrastructure for cloud computing exists today, so it’s great to see this level of interest. Microsoft began our journey to the cloud more than 10 years ago and we have some very strong offerings across productivity, management and software as a service.”

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Cloud Migration Can Lift a Business

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Moving a company’s server room and local applications to the cloud can eliminate hassles and reduce expenses if you proceed with a good strategy.

Cloud computing enables small businesses to offload all sorts of heavy tech lifting to a third party, freeing you to focus your efforts (and local storage space) on core services and clients. Cloud computing can mean many things, but in essence it describes IT tools delivered through Internet-based services. A growing number of services provide infrastructure, platforms, and software that lives in the cloud.

For example, many businesses find managing a data center on-site to be not only undesirable but impossible. Small companies waste money and work hours keeping heavy-duty hardware and software running. Shifting to an offsite virtual server makes those headaches vanish.

In addition to removing server management from the equation, shifting to the cloud can reduce expenses and increase productivity in connection with software. You can use subscription-based online apps in place of expensive software licensed for individual desktops, and you can give employees unlimited access to databases and other shared resources. Service-based software is flexible and easy to expand on the fly.

Cloud services are particularly attractive for start-ups that have minimal physical infrastructure to rely on. For companies with legacy systems, migrating to the cloud can be more complex, but it doesn’t have to be.

Cloud migration resists a one-size-fits-all approach. Though the cloud involves abstract concepts, the data and tools you move are the lifeblood of your business, so you must develop a solid strategy.

For instance, you need not relocate every application and every shred of data from desktops and in-house servers to the cloud. An IT pro should help you select what and how much to move forward. If you archive business information from the 1990s on a system that you can access in a pinch, that may be good enough. You probably don’t need to migrate data that’s been stale since the last century.

In addition, maintaining local assets–such as Photoshop for your designers or HR software for the payroll team–continues to makes sense. Other tools are better left to the cloud, especially for roaming workers. Customer relationship management databases via Salesforce, for example, are accessible across multiple platforms, including smartphones.

“The cloud is in a sense your front end, and on-premise is your back end,” says Rick Villars, an IDC analyst who specializes in storage. “Information in the cloud brings advantages in terms of accessibility.”

Moving to the cloud won’t eliminate the need for IT professionals, but it will reshape their duties. They may no longer have to wake up at dawn to patch servers, but they’ll have to ensure that the company can get what it needs from remotely housed data or applications. A cloud migration may quell familiar headaches, but as with any shift in technology, new problems will crop up.

Administrative tasks may lessen as strategic thinking moves to the forefront. New, ongoing tasks for tech workers are likely to require fewer nuts-and-bolts capabilities to set up and fix storage and local networking.

IT pros may need to polish their people skills as they emerge from the back room and respond increasingly to requests from managers and other users. Can employees get to data whenever they need it? IT pros may find themselves asked to retrieve special sets of data to help a company comply with financial, privacy, and other legal codes.

What happens if data vanishes from a remotely hosted database? The hands-off aspect of remote storage may make it harder to determine the cause of the disappearance. Because many cloud services involve multiple hardware and software vendors, solving other problems also can be tricky.

An off-site data center may promise all sorts of checks and balances in case of an emergency, but you should do additional research, plan a disaster recovery plan specific to your business, and make sure that it prepares for more than one potential point of failure. Such planning may be tricky, as no third-party programs exist at this point for certifying internal backup arrangements among cloud services. Moreover, in the virtual world, backing up data and backing up a virtual machine are different processes.

Once you’ve created a strong migration plan, choosing the right service providers may boil down to a matter of trust. Migrating to the cloud carelessly or haphazardly is worse than thoughtfully retaining assets in your hands.

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