An overview for SME’s  considering Cloud implementation

One minute the experts tell us that the cloud is here, it’s happening, and it’s the best thing ever. And then you get a wave of warnings about how businesses should be careful about bursting onto hosted cloud services.

Cloud computing is a marketing term for technologies that provide computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services.

A parallel to this concept can be drawn with the electricity grid, wherein end-users consume power without needing to understand the component devices or infrastructure required to provide the service.

Businesses will continue to manage data using ‘on-premise’ hardware – and it’s likely that they will always need to run their mission-critical services across such networks. So how does cloud networking fit in?

Gartner www.gartner.com predict that in 2012 20 per cent of businesses will own no IT assets as a number of inter-related trends drive movement towards decreased hardware assets. The need for computing hardware, either in a data centre or on an employee’s desk, will not go away. However, the ownership of hardware will shift to third parties, and so there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry.

The reality is that IT networks are made up of essential physical assets and in the short term no manager will need to completely replace their hardware with cloud-based platforms.

Hybrid Cloud

The first steps should be to implement private cloud with infrastructure operated solely for a single organisation, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally. A public cloud should be reserved for specific, low risk services and is based on the standard cloud-computing model, in which a service provider makes resources, such as applications and storage, available to the general public over the Internet.

“If I was starting a new business today I wouldn’t buy my own infrastructure, using the cloud means you don’t have to invest in additional hardware capacity. The cloud offers smaller organisations a great platform for IT services and it could be argued that a majority of new start ups would utilise cloud offerings” James Lewis MD Evolvement Networks

Existing businesses that have invested heavily into on-premise hardware might consider a phased approach to cloud migration, moving services over when it makes most sense for the organisation in terms of it’s hardware upgrade cycle. Business services such as email, software, and development are the simplest things to move across, databases are the trickiest and tend to house business critical information, so think hard about whether to move these to the cloud at all.

Some of the potential issues with cloud computing include loss of connection to the service provider and lack of bandwidth to access sites. For example, a finance application may be stored in location ‘A’ that may be some distance away from location ‘B’ where the finance team is. This physical separation can lead to performance delays if the bandwidth isn’t in place to support the application data across the network.

As a contingency you could have two separate Internet connections from your premises, so if one router or one connection fails there is a backup to connect to your information. It is also important to have a solid SLA and contract in place with your service provider.

Find out more about how Evolvement can help with Cloud Services