5 Mistakes Enterprises Make While Moving to Cloud

By SiliconIndia | Thursday, January 12, 2012

The advantages of moving into Cloud environments are phenomenal, given their ability to cut infrastructure costs and its resource sharing nature. However, enterprises lured by such benefits could head into troubled waters if a proper consulting in IT is neglected, before taking the plunge. Here's a list of some of the most common mistakes the enterprises commit:

Moving Towards Wrong Cloud Environment:
Different Clouds offer differentiated services, suitable for specific enterprise related tasks. SaaS solutions are apt for shared resource applications that are outsized. They are known to provide substantial cost reductions in CRM and ERP based solutions. However, they fail to satiate the large organization's security and compliance needs.
Nevertheless, the IaaS encompasses an assorted list of offerings such as leveraging the organizations in implementing their own security services, which is manageable but requiring the right amount of overhead in tapping the skilled IT expertise.

The PaaS solutions are slated to be the best for hosting web-based applications. However, they aren't able to provide customized security services and it often has very narrow OS options.

Hence, it is imperative to gauge the sensitivity of data and applications needed to run your business, and make a peruse decision in choosing the right cloud services, without compromising on some of the key aspects such as isolation and protection for enterprises.

Discarding the Security Policies:
While most of the organizations migrate to Cloud, they are unable to foresee the perils of security threats, as they are entitled to only hardware-based firewalls that have a limited set of rules; and cannot be adjusted according to their business needs. Majority of the security policies of organizations are compromised during cloud migration, which poses a real challenge for enterprises to emulate the same on Cloud premises. Services such as VPN, Anti-Virus, IPS and Web filtering along with the multi-layered security are the ones which are discarded; all for the realization of cutting measures.

Failure to Recognize New Management Requirements:
As the applications continue to run on virtual servers on the Cloud premises, the task of constant monitoring of the applications becomes an arduous one, requiring skilled expertise that could dig a hole in the budget for Cash or time-strapped IT organizations. Bridging the Virtual-Physical barrier needs more than just a mere addition and usage of management tools such as Cloud (or Virtualization) oriented APM tools, which fails to fill the void. The organizations should be well-informed and better equipped for explicitly monitoring these applications.

Wastage of Resources:
As more businesses are going the Cloud way, they are unable to monitor and audit the usage of resources such as the datacenter assets, which are provisioned on cloud for using its services. Most of the tracking works are outsourced and the Cloud provider has the responsibility of monitoring the usage. These factors demand the need for organizations to be more dexterous in tracking the usage in order to avoid over provisioning of the Cloud resources.

Focusing More on Server Migration:
Most of the administrators of Cloud are oblivious to the tasks of enhancing the performance of applications. They are concentrating on server related issues such as disk usage, memory and CPU; though there is much scope for improving the application performance for varied processes, interactions, shared or unshared resources, which can be accentuated using the right development tools for applications in rendering appropriate business services.