19 Apr Cloud Enablement: What it is and How to Get Started
The COVID-19 and resulting telework requirements spurred renewed adoption of cloud solutions. However, as we move forward into the “Next Normal,” a purposeful cloud enablement strategy is key to a successful cloud migration project. So let’s get started with a cloud enablement definition and then we will examine the benefits and best practices.
What is Cloud Enablement?
Cloud enablement is the process of assessing a company’s existing IT environment and architecting and building an effective cloud environment for businesses to deploy IT resources. This process generally includes implementation of new solutions as well as migrating existing servers, data, applications, desktop and operating systems to the cloud.
Cloud enablement may involve dedicated private cloud, multi-tenant private cloud, or public cloud. Often, cloud enablement projects take a hybrid approach and require careful assessment and planning to reduce disruption to business operations and ensure ROI. What is Managed Cloud Hosting?
How Cloud Enablement Helps Businesses
Now that we have a cloud enablement definition, let’s look at some of the benefits of cloud enablement.
- Ensures Cloud Migration Success: Taking a strategic approach to address specific challenges and needs of your business will ensure the success of your overall cloud strategy.
- Improves Access: Remote capabilities have rapidly become vital to business success. The ability to connect to applications and data from any device and from any location is now a competitive requirement in most business sectors.
- Supports Innovation: Because cloud enables increased workloads and greater agility it is able to support innovation. It also delivers better access to data insights, improved collaboration and positions a business to be better equipped to pivot their models to meet changing demands.
- Boosts Scalability: Especially where subscription software is concerned, it is easier and more affordable than ever to expand and contract IT resources to meet changing demands, seasonal cycles and market fluctuations.
- Increases Availability: Most cloud services providers have service level agreements with uptime above 99%.
- Disaster Recovery: With built-in backups and servers in multiple locations, cloud enablement protects businesses against natural disasters and cyberattacks.
What are Cloud Enablement Challenges
About 83% of organizations say security is a top challenge to enabling cloud. Other challenges include managing cloud spend, governance, lack of resources and a lack of expertise, according to Statista.com.
In answer to these challenges, the various “as-a-service” offerings are among the most widely used cloud enablement solutions.
“These services provide organizations with access to computing power, software, and other cloud-related functions without the need for in-house hardware,” said Statista.
Benefits of Partnering with a Cloud Hosting Provider
With a private cloud hosting partner, businesses get the best of both private cloud enablement and outsourcing cloud. Benefits include:
- Reduced up-front costs
- Tailored architecture
- High levels of support and services
- Maintain complete control of data and resources
- Options for dedicated vs. shared environment
- Added security
- Compliance and governance assurances
Discover the benefits of Virtual Desktop Hosting
Cloud Enablement Strategy
Here are a few key steps for a successful cloud enablement strategy.
Assess the Needs of the Business: It is important to evaluate your current IT environment and identify pain points. Survey your management team to gain a deeper understanding of what each department needs and what is currently working well for them.
Identify Goals: Define exactly what you hope to gain by enabling cloud across the organization. Common goals may include reduced IT overhead, improved agility and enabling teleworking opportunities.
Prioritize for a Phased Approach: It is common to roll out a phased approach to going cloud. Maybe desktop virtualization is your first priority, maybe it is moving accounting software to the cloud or implementing a customer service portal. Understanding these priorities will help you in the early planning stages of your cloud enablement strategy.
Evaluate Architecture: Evaluate front-end customer platforms, back-office platforms, cloud-based delivery and your network needs to understand where the heaviest lifting will be required. Understanding the interactions between these architectures will help you design a holistic strategy rather than a patchwork approach.
Choosing A Cloud Partner: As mentioned above, there are many benefits to supporting cloud enablement by partnering with a cloud hosting provider. Of course, not all cloud providers are equal in terms of service, security, compliance and more.
What to look for in a cloud hosting partner:
- Extensive expertise with application and cloud hosting in a Microsoft and Citrix environment.
- Enterprise-level technical expertise with MCSE’s, CCA, certified data center managers, and experienced business process experts.
- Always-on customer support, with engineers accessible after hours, including weekends, holidays and in case of any emergency.
- Immediate response times for any incident – our engineers are notified by sophisticated application and server performance monitoring systems
- Data servers contain dual power supplies connected to separate power circuits for optimal reliability.
- Servers contain dual network cards in a fault-tolerant cluster; cards are also connected to different network switches, which are in turn connected to separate routers.
- RAID 5 hard drive configuration with hot spare storage.
- Load balanced servers help keep your system up and running; if one fails, apps continue to operate.
- Servers are protected by warranties which include a three-year on-site warranty and an extended pre-failure warranty.
- Redundant CISCO routers and Dell switches; redundant feeds to the routers.
Understanding Cloud Choices
Many businesses build their own in-house cloud environment, but there are also three essential types of 3rd party cloud. Here’s how the benefits of each break down:
DEDICATED PRIVATE CLOUD
- Highly Secure SSAE-18 certified data centers
- Anytime, anywhere mobile access
- High levels of control and customization
- Comprehensive 99.9% Service Level Agreement
- Updates, upgrades and fixes included in monthly pricing
- Complete SOX policy library for audit trail documentation
- HIPAA, FDA, SOX knowledgeable technical staff
- Certified technical staff
- Separate network, active directory and servers
- Multi-factor security infrastructure
MULTI-TENANT CLOUD
- Highly Secure SSAE-18 certified data centers
- Anytime, anywhere mobile access
- High levels of control and customization
- Comprehensive 99.9% Service Level Agreement
- Updates, upgrades and fixes included in monthly pricing
- Complete SOX policy library for audit trail documentation
- HIPAA, FDA, SOX knowledgeable technical staff
- Certified technical staff
- Separate network, active directory and servers
- Multi-factor security infrastructure
PUBLIC CLOUD
- Reliable Cloud Infrastructure
- Anytime, anywhere mobile access
- Deployment flexibility with secure connections
- Comprehensive Service Level Agreement
- Updates, upgrades, and fixes included in monthly pricing (Subscription Licenses)
- Choice of a desktop client, web client or SharePoint client
- Certified technical staff to help troubleshooting
Despite earlier projections that cloud demand would decline in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and new work-from-home requirements changed everything. As it turned out, cloud demand remained steady at 30%, and is expected to hold at pre-2019 levels through 2025, according to Deloitte research. To be successful in the cloud, a holistic cloud enablement strategy is vital to success.
Cloud is an increasingly complex and important part of your business’s IT environment. While many businesses lack the expertise to deploy their cloud enablement strategy, partnering with a cloud provider and hosting partner can help even small organizations go cloud with minimal upfront investment and reduced strain on the business.
Ready to get started in the cloud? CyberlinkASP is an award-winning cloud hosting provider with a proven track record for enabling cloud for businesses of all sizes.