Is Your Company Ready For The Cloud?

You’ve decided to take your company to the cloud, and have chosen an experienced and capable implementation partner.  Now what?  Your implementation partner can help you create a cloud strategy, but you’ll still need to work internally and meet with other leaders to make sure you have an action plan that sets you up for success.  Cloud strategy isn’t just the business side – you need to make sure your network and infrastructure are ready too!

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​Company Size and Growth​
What are your growth plans for the company?  Is the cloud solution you choose today still going to be a good fit for your company tomorrow?  Make sure the cloud solution you choose works with the size of your organization – both currently and in the future.  Most cloud platforms are scalable and can grow as more people join your ranks, but some cloud solutions may be overkill if you’re a smaller organization.
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Roadmapping
What does success look like for you short term and 1, 2, 5 years down the road?  If you haven’t already, now is a good time to check in with the other leaders at your organization to confirm the cloud is the right fit for you.  You’ll also need to talk about which processes to start migrating first.  A phased approach can help make the transition more manageable for you and your team.  Make a list of all potential processes you could move to the cloud.  Then work with your team to rank and prioritize them based on criteria such as process maturity, impact to the organization, and efficiencies gained.

​Start with Why
Take some time to re-affirm with other leaders that this is the right choice for your organization.  Write down your top 3 reasons for moving to the cloud and make sure they tie to your organization’s goals.  What is the value proposition for moving to the cloud?  Keep these reasons in mind and refer back to them throughout the cloud migration – from beginning to end.  Think about it from the business perspective as well as the end user’s perspective.  End users can make or break your cloud migration and the sooner you prepare them for the change the better.

Some common reasons to move to the cloud include:

• Streamlined and more efficient processes
• Scalable solution matches your organization’s demand
• Flexible solution tailored to your organization's needs
• Scheduled updates and a stable environment
• Disaster recovery and better document backups
• Work from anywhere – access to the cloud on the go!

Wait, what about your network strategy?
From a business strategy perspective, you may be ready to go.  But can your infrastructure setup support the cloud?  This is something that gets neglected by a lot of companies who are working on migrating towards the cloud, but it’s incredibly important.  If you miss this step, you set yourself and your organization up for quality issues.  Quality issues can lead to a poor user experience and low user adoption rates.

Network Assessment
Even if you are happy with your current network performance, you should always have an assessment done to compare with future platform requirements.  This will give you a baseline to compare the current state of the network against the requirements for your cloud platform and give you metrics to measure quality improvement against.
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Network assessments can look at things like your company’s:
1.  QoS - Quality of Service

• Implement or verify that proper QoS is in place to properly segment and prioritize traffic types.  Use Quality of Service (QoS) to mitigate risks in the event of unanticipated network events.

2.  WiFi

• Plan and optimize the WiFi bands and access point placement!  Not enough or poorly located Wireless Access Points will result in inconsistent and spotty quality in your buildings.

3.  Routing

• Will your traffic be routed properly for the new platform?  Eliminate and bypass hairpins and bottlenecks when possible.  Make sure all required ports and IPs are opened, otherwise cloud services may work improperly or not at all.

4.  VPN

• Depending on the platform you are using, utilizing a specific type of VPN may be advisable (e.g. split-tunnel).  Many cloud platforms encrypt traffic and a VPN can introduce another unnecessary layer of encryption.  Ask your implementation partner for a recommendation if you’re stuck.

5.  Monitoring and Optimization

• Once your network is cloud-ready, how do you keep it that way during and after launch?  Create a well-defined plan or process for ongoing network monitoring, quality analysis and remediation of performance issues post deployment.

Need a hand?
There are a lot of things to consider when moving to the cloud!  The experienced team at Pivotal can help you perfect your Cloud strategy and perform a network assessment to make sure your infrastructure can support your needs.  Ready to get started?