SaaS: Making the Move to the Cloud

So, you’ve heard a lot about Cloud Computing, On-Demand and SaaS.  You’ve heard that you can save money, operate more flexibly, reduce the need for specialized in-house IT skills, and be be more operationally efficient. You’ve heard the numbers that about a quarter of all US businesses are actively using or are experimenting with cloud computing.  Now you’re ready to give it a try.  But where do you start?

While cloud computing does have a lot of benefits, it isn’t magic, and it does have risks.  Like any other part of your business, you need to plan and prepare to ensure your ultimate success.

Here’s some advice on how to proceed:

1.  Start small and expand incrementally.   One of the biggest sources of failure in any project is to try to take on too much when you still have limited experience.  Pilot.  Prototype.  Experiment.   Select something that is important but that isn’t necessarily business critical; something that will be able to prove the merit of the approach.  A good starting point is with a front-office application, or a collaboration application, or an application usable by remote workers like CRM.

Here we consider the creation of a cloud-based repository for structured data — a repository for storing things like Microsoft Office or PDF file.  Perhaps a replacement for what currently might be a shared file server on your network.

2.  Consider data criticality. Your cloud-based SLA may offer uptime guarantees of 99.9 percent, but that still means there may be some number of hours during the year when your data won’t be able to be reached.  This level of availability will probably be satisfactory for nearly all of your documents.  But some document may not be good candidates.  Consider financial documents, for example, which may be critical for processes such as end-of-month accounting.  Critical documents like those may be better to store somewhere other than in the cloud, or perhaps kept in a secondary location.

3.  Consider data size. Moving large files back and forth to a remote service can take up a lot of bandwidth and potentially result in incurring large bandwidth fees.  Investigate typical use cases for your data to see whether remote hosting makes sense.

4.  Infrequently Used Files.  Files that are seldom used are good candidates to move to the cloud.  While it is important to weed out and delete unneeded files, some documents need to be retained although they are seldom accessed.  These types of files are excellent candidates for cloud-based storage.

5.  Consider security.  Make sure the vendor has the background and experience for managing cloud-based data.  Check the vendor’s approach and track-record for security.  Do they protect you against data leaks and IP theft?  Make sure that they have business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

6.  Estimate your costs. Make an inventory of the files you currently have that are candidates to move to the cloud and estimate the storage space that they take up.  Based on that you can begin to compare vendor pricing for your current needs.

7.  Compression and Encryption.  Consider compressing and encrypting the files that you store to reduce storage space and save on storage fees and to provide additional data security.