Moving to the cloud may save money on hardware purchases, but poor planning and lack of the right combination of skills can quickly eat up these savings. Nevertheless, there are lots of strategies that can ensure a successful cloud-based solution, and we have distilled them into TK issues:

 

First, make sure you bake in the right expectations and plan ahead.  “It all starts with design,” says Bryan Doerr, the CTO of Town and Country, Mo.-based Savvis. “Make sure you understand the performance and security characteristics of the cloud, so that you can achieve the levels you expect. Also, understand what kinds of support are possible in the cloud. If you are not monitoring the performance by your own staff, you may want your service provider to do that.”

 

Skill sets played a big role with Emergent Solutions, Inc., a consultancy based in Royal Oaks, Calif. They moved from a Microsoft Sharepoint solution to Socialtext cloud-based application for handling discussions and project management for their 60 contractors located around the globe. “We had learning issues with people who didn’t use Sharepoint, and found that Socialtext worked better for us. We also were able to get rid of all of our servers and now we have everything backed up with Mozy on their cloud service,” says the company’s co-founder Christine Cavanaugh-Simmons.

 

As a result, they are a lot more productive. “People in different countries and continents are all working asynchronously, creating agendas, materials, and presentations to our customers,” she says. “There is no waiting for a weekly meeting or status update. People can engage each other in open conversations, provide feedback, and feel like a part of the team.” That kind of camaraderie was missing when they were on Sharepoint.

 

Part of these expectations is in understanding what is perception and what is reality, because sometimes the two can be at odds with each other and prevent any cloud-based project from moving forward. “The evidence is that data is just as secure and in many cases more secure,” says Dave Cutler, the general manager with Slalom Consulting, a national consultancy in Chicago. The larger companies can be more rational about this decision, where smaller companies might have a key executive who can nix the entire deal, such as the CEO, with more emotional rather than factual reasons behind the decision.”

 

Sometimes the justification for a cloud-based solution can come from the oddest places. Take the example of a karate studio that is a client of JEB and Co., a network and services consultancy based in Chandler, Ariz.  “We won them over with Google Docs and its forms capability. The studio hosts all sorts of tournaments and had sign-up sheets and papers all over their walls. We set up a series of Google Docs-based forms and email them to everyone, says Jamie Barmach, the President of JEB.

“We can view and track revisions in each document. And wireless synch is really nice, you can run your business from the palm of your hand because you have contacts, calendar and email right on your phone. ”

 

Costs can certainly be a consideration. “A restaurant that I am working with has 120 Exchange mailboxes,” says Barmach. “We got a three year break-even point for their move to Google Apps, and this doesn’t include ongoing Exchange server and software maintenance and upgrades, too.”

 

Cavanaugh-Simmons is saving tons of money and some support staff head count with their cloud-based applications too. “I got infected with a virus, and I lost nothing. Took me minutes to restore my files. If we still had everything on our own servers, I would have had to pay IT to come in. So we are saving money all over the place with this cloud stuff and we don’t even have a meaningful monthly bill for our IT services either.”

 

Second, the cloud can be flexible, if managed properly. “One of the reasons you go to the cloud in the first place is because these peak demands can be handled flexibly over time,” says Doerr.

 

But just because you have the flexibility to add or subtract capacity on demand doesn’t mean much when you need to have human intervention to make this happen.  Yes, the cloud can be terrific to adjust capacity, but “you want to develop a process to respond to these peaks or when you have too much capacity and act accordingly,” says Doerr. “As an industry, we can automatically provision stuff quickly, but what we can’t do yet is make decisions quickly. How long it will take to add capacity to this app? How long to recognize a failure and respond?”

 

One of the nice aspects of using the cloud to run your applications is that “you can constantly be morphing your portal suite to what you want it to become,” says Doug Pierce, the CIO of Momentum Worldwide based in Clayton, Mo. Momentum is an interactive marketing agency that developed a collection of cloud-based applications and integrated them together for common tasks such as client management, Web conferencing, blogging and Wikis. The entire collection has a single sign-on and is used by more than 2,000 staffers around the world.

 

Part of managing a move to the cloud may involve a series of stages to acclimate your staff to its way of life. This is what San Francisco-based Presidio Health did. “Presidio had to handle a 16 times increase in data volume in a year and replace some aging hardware,” says its CTO Thomas Gregory. “We didn’t want a lot of capital expense, and we wanted an environment that was safe and could spread our risk around.” The healthcare software provider took a multi-stage process towards cloud computing, by first keeping their data inside their data center but migrating their apps to the cloud. “We were able to increase our computing power by 70% without increasing our IT budget.”

 

The next step was to move their data over to the cloud. “Having the first step of a hybrid cloud was more complex, but it gave us some experience with handling the cloud apps and understanding the security implications. It was a lot easier to leave our backend servers in our cabinets while we migrated the front end.  And anyway, most of the cloud environment deals with the front-end interfaces so that gave us time to work on those.”

 

The company uses a combination of Eclipse and Spring-based open source software, Appistry for handling their cloud services management and hosts everything at Sacramento-based Stratascale. “We wanted a provider that was close enough to get to in an emergency but not located in the same earthquake fault zone as our offices.”

 

What made this two-step process successful was that Gregory planned the entire process out in advance. “You need to take the time to analyze what you have and find a solution that will allow you to scale what you have and make the necessary adjustments along the way.”

 

Third, you want to carefully consider the implications of compliance and privacy regulations when you are making the move to the cloud, and understand what are the impacts on your new set of applications. And also consider the geographies that your customers will be connecting from and what local regulations apply as well.

 

“If you do business in the UK, they have personal data privacy restrictions that can impact your decisions based on where your cloud provider stores their data and how they manage it,” says Cutler. In addition to the regulatory environment, he says you also need to consider your staffing implications: you may need staff with new or different skill sets to manage your cloud applications.

 

Another obvious consideration is bandwidth. “Make sure your existing network is ready for the migration to the cloud and is fast enough internally and with a fast Internet connection. You need to have a sufficient network pipe to support your users so they don’t perceive any performance degradation,” says Cutler.

 

Finally, realize that just because your apps are in the cloud doesn’t mean that you can ignore what is in your office completely. “There is still a lot of local work that needs to be done when evaluating any cloud-based solution, says Tim Crawford, the CIO at All Covered, an IT services company to the SMB market that is based in Redwood City, Calif. “Desktops and network need configuration, security has to be set up properly, hardware and firewalls need managing. Even if you move all your servers off site, there is still a lot to touch on-site.”

 

As you can see, there is a lot to learn about cloud services but with some planning and careful choices it can be a successful operation.