Considering moving workloads to the cloud? Below are some considerations provided by Bob DuBois followed by my firm’s IaaS Story.
There are many considerations that go into the decision making process of moving workloads to the cloud. When we think of the cloud, I like to ask what are you moving and why?
These may seem like easy questions to answer, but I contend it is not. We will look at a couple of considerations that need to be addressed before you can plan further.
What type of cloud provider are you considering? Is it; public, private or hybrid? Is it for Infrastructure as a Service, Software as a Service or Platform as a Service? The answers to those will create a new set of questions.
Let’s consider, Software as A Service. Will this service be in a public cloud provider or a private cloud. In most cases the provider of the service will dictate that and provide management, technical expertise and security as part of the solution.
Now, let’s consider Infrastructure as a Service. This provides you with more flexibility as to provider type, however, this also can increases your security, technical expertise and risk profile.
- Robert DuBois
RDuBois@briggs.com
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In the spring of 2016 my firm gave us about eight months lead-time notice on opening our first two international locations. Our UK office would be 3 attorneys working out of 2 equally equipped rental offices in Southampton and London, plus one-attorney with an assistant working out of an existing Munich office. Both locations were to go live on 1/1/17.
We quickly made the decision to not provision on-prem hardware supported remotely by U.S. IT staff or locally by new support vendors. Instead we chose to go with an IaaS Infrastructure as a Service model on a public cloud. We viewed this as the perfect opportunity to dip our toes into “the cloud.”
One of my team leads likes to share this graphic. So it is with IaaS. Forced to move quickly by business dictates we elected to go with AWS and to put in it AD, File and Print, iManage and Exchange services (largely and virtually matching the structure of our US offices). That was about 4 months of time. Then from contract execution with our integrator to having accessible, cloud-based servers was about six weeks.
IaaS is conceptually simple and remarkably flexible. In this utility (aka consumption) model you spec out and get provisioned a specified numbers of servers and storage. Need more CPU or RAM for year-end processing or no longer need a ton of storage for that litigation matter? Both are clicks and minutes away via a management portal with immediate implementation and financial adjustment.
In this model you pay for Compute and Storage used on a monthly basis. This is a hugely significant accounting change that must be accepted by firm leadership as you switch from a CapEx to OpEx cost model.
Considerations to factor in include provider criteria (experience, marketplace position, costs & cost model, data center locations and your ability to utilize specific ones, cloud SLAs); levels of complexity (for tech integration, the cost model, backup and DR); security; data protection; privacy requirements; client requirements.
Lessons learned: don’t do this on your own – select and use an experienced cloud integrator and use their expertise. Politics affect IT (Brexit, GDPR) and varies from country to country. As always, effective & careful design is critical to success – measure twice and cut once.
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Attached are the two ILTACON 2017 presentations that we spoke at. These go into further detail around the Cloud debate and Real World On-Prem Cloud Migrations.
The_Cloud_vs_No_Cloud.ppt
Real_World_On_Prem_to_Cloud_Migrations.pptx