Thinking about moving to the cloud? Here’s some sound advice and recommendations:
- Take time upfront to work out your deployment strategy (on S3/EC2, for example) with your vendor
- Make sure to consider things like redundancy, failover, and disaster recovery
- Last but not least, run tests on server sizing – ensure that you have an idea how many transactions or users can be supported seamlessly on various cloud server instance sizes
I won’t take credit since the suggestions above aren’t mine, they came directly from a client who’s just done this successfully (please feel free to add your own feedback/experiences to the list — positive and/or negative– in the comments) .
Re: migrating to the cloud, a quick scan of these case studies highlights how Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) give companies the building blocks needed to scale and keep up with demand. The categories outline how AWS S3 and EC2 have benefited companies that provide application/media/web hosting, backup and storage, content delivery, e-commerce, search engines and other similar offerings.
There seems to be a dearth of B2B companies in the list, and I wonder why?
A host of other organizations can reap substantial advantages over dedicated hosting …even more so, one may argue, in today’s challenging times. And this definitely holds true for B2B companies making the move to the cloud, regardless of their size or product portfolio. Now is the ideal time for companies to position themselves for future growth. Moreover, why leave money on the table?
A recent case in point is one of bHive’s B2B clients, a global leader in wireless LANs and secure mobility solutions. Their Internet/Web infrastructure was using servers co-located at a managed data center to date, and has now successfully moved into the cloud. While they were strategically committed to migrating to the cloud, there were still questions on the process as well as empowerment of their IT team to manage the infrastructure moving forward.
The experts in the bHive’s cloud computing/on-demand services team quickly put any concerns to rest. How? Via a systematic process that included clearly communicated technical analysis, strategy and objectives, followed by working sessions, training and complete documentation to ensure a smooth transfer of skills and expertise. The team got down to work, with the focus on efficient implementation and quick transition of the infrastructure to the client’s IT team.
This B2B client is already seeing benefits that go beyond the immediate 60 percent cost savings in IT capex (projected to increase to over 70 percent over the next 3 years). The most compelling part of using bHive’s services was that the customer’s transition to the cloud was done in a seamless manner with no impact on uptime and performance to users. Another unique aspect of this specific bHive implementation was establishing VPN tunnels that enabled a completely transparent implementation of the cloud infrastructure as an extension of the client’s corporate network.
David Noland, bHive’s typically reticent cloud computing expert in residence, was unusually vocal about this success: “One of the neat things was the ease of migration…even though we had to deal with a range of legacy systems that came from past acquisitions et al, it was simple to create images of the existing servers and make replicas using AWS. Things that would normally take days were literally done in a matter of hours, so we were able to quickly set up staging servers, take OS snapshots, implement flexible provisioning of storage and testing environments. This helped the team to quickly and confidently move the project through to completion within six weeks.”
The B2B client is pleased by the success of this implementation and is looking to expand the scope of the project. bHive has also worked with companies like Lenovo and Sun to solve specific challenges related to cloud infrastructure. But, given this recent experience, I now think forward-thinking small- to mid-sized companies stand to gain the most. Clearly, this project is a model to other enterprising companies looking to leverage the cloud. Learn how you can benefit too.
