With promises to reduce capital spend and increase infrastructure flexibility, cloud adoption rates have been accelerating. Many businesses now proudly announce their strategy is ‘cloud-first,’ meaning all future developments will take place using hosted platforms and services.
Obviously, these are compelling reasons for adoption. But as with any paradigm shift in technology strategy, IT directors need to think beyond the ‘here and now,’ taking a more pragmatic view of the longer-term future.
Flexible. On the way in.
Signing up for the cloud often requires little more than a credit card– as evidenced by shadow IT uptake of unsanctioned services by non-IT business units. Even technical solutions like Amazon AWS have developed solutions to streamline uptake, like the 100TB AWS Snowball device used for facilitating mass data transfer.
Most cloud providers– Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google– are focused on adoption. Transferring data and applications to the cloud is often free, removing any financial arguments against immediate uptake.
Getting into the cloud is easy– but what happens when your plans change?
What is your exit strategy?
Getting out of a particular cloud platform can be much more difficult. Shifting virtualized servers is relatively easy, but what of the enormous data stores that sit behind them? Outgoing data transfer is metered and charged on a nominal per-unit basis. Moving away from a particular service could be extremely expensive.
There is also the question of what happens to your serverless applications, built using the disparate services and APIs available in the cloud. What cost to re-engineer these apps when switching between Microsoft and Amazon AWS, for instance?
Your strategy will inevitably change at some point in the future and you will need to address these issues. Delaying (or ignoring) these questions is simply storing up problems (and costs) for a later date.
Ultimately, you must delay your cloud adoption plans until you have formulated an exit strategy. Until then, CDS has you covered– give us a call to discuss how we can provide interim maintenance and support for your storage hardware.