by William McKnight | Publisher: Technics Publications | Release Date: November 2018 | ISBN: 9781634624497

Learn about the factors that impact our organizations when shifting data and applications to the cloud. What must you consider first before moving to the cloud? This video will cover the major decision points that management needs to know when moving to the cloud, including: Changes to the software model. Just about any software, including databases, can be placed in a public cloud these days. Today, several platforms were “born in the cloud” and several others have had major engineering for the cloud. Software comes with a wide array of integration with the cloud from a licensing perspective including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Development and quality assurance. Agile development (and QA) is made possible by being able to provision quickly, a unique characteristic of cloud database deployments. Recovery from outage and credit for downtime. For example, this is Amazon's current policy: If the Annual Uptime Percentage for a customer drops below 99.95% for the Service Year, that customer is eligible to receive a Service Credit equal to 10% of their bill (excluding one- time payments made for Reserved Instances) for the Eligible Credit Period. Safe harbor and cross-border restrictions. For multinational companies, the concern about safe harbor and country border restrictions for data keeps many from going to the cloud. Also in the last few years, countries have begun to engage in protectionist measures to restrict the flow of data across borders. Capacity planning and growth. The platform should be able to grow or shrink. The platform should provision only what is needed. It should take minutes—not hours—to scale up or down or create little disruption for migration or repartitioning; otherwise, one of the key benefits of the cloud is lost. The more proactive and involved a customer has to be in the process of resource determination, the less elastic the solution is. Security and privacy. Security and privacy are the largest areas of concern today with the cloud. You need to do your homework with your security policy. Just as a breach can occur in your data center, it can also occur at cloud hosting data centers. Disaster recovery. Includes digestible cost, room to scale, good fit for dual-purpose, and practically maintenance free. Query performance and service levels. Cloud query performance will depend on the same factors as on-premises query performance. One of the factors in cloud-specific performance is that you may be sharing the underlying infrastructure with others (multi-tenant). Guaranteed network bandwidth is the other lever that is unique to managing cloud performance. Data interchange in the cloud. No successful enterprise application sits in total isolation. Performance considerations for data interchange are similar to those above for query performance. Cloud setups have different pricing models for ingesting and moving data in and out of the cloud. Staffing levels are not zero; what does my staff still do?. What is the escalation for production failures in the middle of the night? Who will manage hardware and software patching? How will we make the call/expend the budget for additional disk/CPU/memory as the implementation grows? Organizational change management. The move to the cloud is fraught with tension and apprehension and much of it will come from IT It is a big change-perhaps the most visceral change many people will experience in their career. Stakeholders of the cloud move come from various parts of the organization and beyond. Job roles will change. Picking first targets for the journey. The first move should be something with the right amount of criticality. Pick a manageable problem to solve. Consider technical integration points of the application with the “legacy” environment.

1. Transitioning to the Cloud 00:31:29