Apr

Ten Opportunities To Adopt Public Clouds

public-cloud CRM, email, development and testing are part of the list of technologies that can migrate to the cloud and allow improvements to business.

As the discussion on cloud computing becomes more intense, a clear issue that we will have is: within two to three years, many critical systems will be running on clouds Even big companies will adopt public clouds with greater intensity, creating hybrid clouds, with part of applications running on private clouds and public clouds in part.

CEOs, CFOs CIOs want to make more effective use of public cloud servers because the model has the power to reverse fixed costs into variable. Moreover, concerns about security and privacy, and a sense of loss of control of internal data, prevents companies change aggressively for cloud.

When the suspicion of security is unsuccessful, the issues to be resolved are the integration and interoperability between different clouds, and between on-premise applications that will run on private clouds. Companies do not want to get locked into a single cloud provider. Seek freedom to move between private and public clouds, and switch vendors according to computing needs, whether they are growing or shrinking. And then, governance of the environment in clouds becomes an additional challenge.

So remember: Having a strategy for adopting public cloud is critical so you should not try to implement it on projects, just to experience the model, without having clearly defined steps.

Choices of the cloud model will increasingly be made in accordance with corporate policies and characteristic services. Here are some cases of adoption of typical public cloud.

1. Development and Testing

One of the first solutions that the company should consider in public cloud is development and testing. In the absence of virtualization, application and database servers can occupy each physical server, with utilization levels of around 10%. Even with the virtualization, the machine can be under-utilized, since the data amount of test equipment in use is lower, compared to that generated during the production phase.

Test data can run these test and development servers, but should also be moved comfortably to the public cloud. In addition, you will only pay for the use. Agile development methodologies, code branching and continuous integration, which require a lot of code and versions, require a large number of application and database servers in parallel.

Moving all these equipment to public clouds makes sense, experts say. Not only the organization pays only when using the services, but network latency, storage costs and performance will also be less of a concern.

2. Platform Development Services

Organizations embrace the principle of DevOps [+ development operations], and increasingly use wire-frames, design, agile project management, automated testing tools and development platforms for continuous integration.

As noted, these services belong to the public cloud, making it easier for developers to eliminate them or request them when needed.

3. Servers Training

Servers training become easier to set up early in training and then can be returned to the end. They may also contain test data instead of real data. From a console, cloud provisioning tools can create or restore servers in the public cloud in minutes. These tools are also ripe for the creation of self-catering.

4. Big Data Projects

When The New York Times had to convert their entire files to PDF format, some years ago, used the public cloud. Opted for hundreds of servers and the job was done in just 24 hours.

If a large data project requires 10,000 servers and the work must be done in a few days or even hours, then public cloud may be the right choice. That’s because it cannot make sense for any organization to buy many physical servers, even if they are virtual.

5. Websites

Company Info, product photos, pricing information, brochures and other content are often hosted in the public cloud. The level of security and privacy in a public cloud may be more than enough to pass the information to the public.

6. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM tools which are already in the cloud should work fine on the public network for client management and prospecting. Usually, they are not strongly integrated with other systems, email, sales and purchase management, making it more easy to migrate it to the public cloud.

7. Projects, Expense Reports and Time Management

As like CRM, these three support applications can smoothly jump to the cloud.

However, if the organization is concerned about the safety and privacy of data, sales and finances can limit the data to a private cloud infrastructure, while reports of project management, time and expense management applications go to the public cloud.

Thus, the company can release a large amount of dedicated servers hosting in a private cloud for mission-critical applications.

8. E-mail

For years, large companies use cloud-based email services to store old messages. Now, it’s only a matter of time before all the emails from companies move towards the same direction, especially for those who use Microsoft Exchange, Zimbra or Office365 servers.

9. Human Resources

Move few applications used by the company to the public cloud frees resources of private cloud for production and other uses. The management of recruitment, benefits administration and HR applications are natural candidates for public cloud.

10. Antispam and Antivirus

Many organizations use cloud services that perform anti-spam and antivirus filtering. Even though these services are hosted by the organization, it may be appropriate to send them to the public cloud.

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