Sunday, September 22, 2013

Cloud Relocation takes planning

Planning for a Cloud Relocation

It is easy to create a new environment in a public IaaS cloud to develop or test a new application.   But it takes planning to relocate a set of applications and shutdown of a legacy infrastructure.   It also takes detailed implementation steps.   I plan on discussing those in future articles.   As CTO of dinCloud, Inc., and as a leader of T3 Dynamics, I have found that there is a limited number of IT leaders and practitioners that have a thorough understanding of the components of a cloud relocation.    

When you relocate applications to an IaaS cloud, the result is the equivalent of a data center transition with a partial outsourcing of IT.   So the topics listed below will not be surprising for experienced IT professionals.   Each, however has a different flavor because this transition is not like any other that has been done before.    I will follow-up with more details on each subject.

Cloud Relocation Planning Topics

  • Business Justification
  • ROI Cloud vendor selection
  • Functional and Non-functional Test planning
    • Application regression testing
    • Performance testing
    •  Security testing
    • Failover testing
  • Network planning
    • Wide area network changes
    • IP Address planning
    • DNS architecture and vendor selection
  • Application architecture planning
    • Inventory of applications, data flow and service interdependencies
    • Application changes (to remove legacy IP addresses) or re-architect for failover
  • Server architecture planning (physical if private cloud; sizing if public cloud)
  • Data architecture planning
    • Data migration or synchronization
    • Design for Disaster recovery
  • ITIL Processes change planning
  • Security change Planning
  • Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery planning
  • Plan to decommission of legacy servers and network

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