CloudU Notebooks is a weekly blog series that explores topics from the CloudU certificate program in bite sized chunks, written by me, Ben Kepes, curator of CloudU. How-tos, interviews with industry giants and the occasional opinion piece are what you can expect to find. If that’s your cup of tea, you can subscribe here.

Running a number of businesses, some using the cloud and some not, I’ve seen firsthand the reality of what it takes to move systems from traditional on-premise delivery to the cloud. Whether it’s because of push-back from users, IT department concerns, functional gaps or differences in the way applications are written, the migration is hard. While many would like to suggest the move from on-prem to cloud as being a smooth progression akin to floating down a calm stream, the reality is that often it’s more a case of battling a heaving sea in a little canoe, all the while braving pirates and sea dragons!

A recent post over on GigaOm discussed an infographic released by Cisco that speaks to some of this pain. To quote GigaOm:

The 2012 Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey queried more than 1,300 people on their feelings and experiences with moving to a cloud computing model. While the majority of respondents expressed relative comfort with the state of their cloud migrations, some took rather extreme negative positions.

While it’s easy to be dubious about these infographics, and the veracity of the data behind them, the post does raise some issues that those in the Ccloud industry, as well as those working within organizations implementing cloud, need to think about. As one commenter said:

Migrating to the cloud is not an easy process but good preparation goes a long way toward making it easier. Many businesses do not have their internal systems in good shape in the first place so migrating them to the cloud in bad condition must be horrendous. It sounds like many of the respondents to the survey need to sort their own end out first before moving to the cloud but do not necessarily have the chance to do so as they are either being told to go into the cloud by CEO/CIOs or they are pretty blindly moving forward without knowing where they’re going. They would be best to simplify their systems as much as they can by getting commonality among internal systems, reining in shadow IT and getting all business units on board.

This is an area that we as cloud evangelists need to front up to. While those of us at the very head of the cloud wave find it easy to shirk off the difficulties of the cloud, and simplistically say that cloud is easier, faster, cheaper and better, that approach is both disrespectful to the real issues that organizations face, and unhelpful if we really want cloud to shine.

Rather we need to look at the issues in their entirety and help organizations embark on a well thought out process as they move to the cloud. It’s one area that I’m noticing developing at the moment as more and more third party cloud providers get founded that have an ethos of truly partnering with their clients and helping them plan a gradual process of migration. I’ve spent a fair amount of time recently with two Australasia-based companies following this model – ProQuest consulting and Trineo both take a view that, from my experience, is more attuned to the realities of their customers.

Part of the reason I created CloudU was to encourage organizations to proactively apprize themselves of the issues they’re likely to face in their move to the cloud. One of the CloudU papers is in fact dedicated to this subject and in it we attempted to draw some general conclusions about where the issues often lie. In fact, later this month I’ll be presenting a workshop at the Cloud Computing Summit that looks at these areas in detail.

As I see it, we can break the issues down into three distinct categories:

• Technical considerations (languages, scale, security, performance, migration)
• External business considerations (costs, vendor lock-in, vendor choice)
• Internal business considerations (the changing IT role, cultural issues)

Over the next few weeks I’ll be looking at these areas in detail as a way of giving organizations looking to move to the cloud something of a step-by-step plan to begin the process. I’d be keen to hear people’s thoughts about my suggestions, and about the issues generally.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

1 Comment
  • I’d also say that some may face a control issue. It isn’t always easy to let others take over your data and rely on them to keep it secure. I guess that also falls into the security consideration. I look forward to your posts.

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