Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS, has become an irresistible solution for many businesses. Rehosting servers, hardware, software, and storage to a third-party provider is cost-effective, scalable, and doesn’t take much to manage and maintain. In fact, IDC reports have found that the IaaS market will see a 41 percent growth through 2016 to 2017. But choosing whether or not it’s right for your business isn’t the hard part, it’s the implementation process that you, as the business owner, should focus on. For those prone to jumping into action, planning an IaaS deployment will be worthwhile.
Prepare your business
A cloud infrastructure migration isn’t as simple as plugging in a device, flipping a switch, and watching all your business issues disappear. Successful IaaS implementation starts with a detailed cloud migration timeline that details current state assessments, audits, and installation deadlines. The migration also impacts every department of your company, not just your IT staff. For this reason, it is necessary to include an end-user training period so that other sectors of the company can quickly get acclimated to the new infrastructure once it’s installed. If done correctly, the migration process should only take 2-3 months.
Take inventory
Most of your planning efforts should be focused on assessing your company’s current systems. In this phase, you must take stock of all your users, applications, current performance levels and internal workflows, servers, and repositories. Based on the findings, this can help you predict which IaaS components you truly need, as opposed to making false assumptions about your workload capacity requirements.
Account for security and compliance
Surveys have repeatedly shown that security and data compliance are still major concerns for companies migrating to the cloud. But in spite of this, companies that willingly adopt IaaS pay little attention to IaaS security. And with hacking incidents on the rise, this can be a problem for organizations that are required to adhere to industry-specific data protection initiatives like HIPAA or PCI-DSS.
Although most cloud providers will be responsible for factors such as hypervisor security and network infrastructure, as the customer, you should should search for an IaaS provider that can also offer the following:
- User-access controls - to regulate sensitive data access.
- Standard Level Agreements (SLAs) - pay close attention to uptime promises from IaaS providers and ignore any that offer less than 99.9% uptime.
- End-to-end encryption - to prevent hackers from intercepting and accessing data in storage and in-flight.
- Intrusion prevention systems - to avoid a variety of known and unknown cyberattacks.
The takeaway here is you shouldn’t rush into an IaaS implementation without evaluating the compliance requirements and security protocols during the migration process.
Get the best provider for the job
A cloud migration plan can be challenging, and it often doesn’t work if you deploy it alone. To lessen the chances of an IT mishap, develop a clear plan that accounts for training time, workloads, security, and compliance. Then get in touch with a trusted managed services provider.
With our years of experience in data center design, deployment, and migration services, transitioning to an IaaS environment doesn’t have to be a daunting task. Visit us at www.intelligis.com to start planning a smooth IaaS implementation today.
