Migrating to the Cloud: Simple or complex?
For many IT managers, moving some of their applications from corporate data centers to cloud computing is a chance to eliminate a litany of costs and headaches: in capital equipment, in electrical power and cooling, in administration and maintenance. “Pay as you go” for the computing power you need, and letting someone else take care of managing the underlying infrastructure is a dream for many IT managers.
But moving from theory to practice, things get complicated. It is true that a new web application built from the ground up for the Cloud as a standalone environment can be deployed quickly and relatively easily. But for existing applications running in a traditional data center and integrating with a host of other systems, tools, and processes, it’s not all that straightforward.
What is really involved when moving from your enterprise data center to the cloud? A number of issues need to be considered that can potentially turn migration into a complex engineering project.
Migrating to the Cloud
Today’s cloud service providers are imposing architectures that are sometimes very different from those of standard enterprise applications, holding back their adoption. There are still no automated tools to pave the way. The result is a series of manual, sometimes complex, trial-and-error configurations before the enterprise application is able to run in the cloud. A complex landscape of specifications for operating system versions, storage, networking, integration with other applications and databases – all those configuration steps that normally take place behind the scenes – must be referred to a Cloud environment that is probably very different from what IT staff are used to. It’s the kind of project that can tie a development team together for weeks or even months.
Data security
When you move data to the Cloud, you move beyond the reach of tools and mechanisms put in place over the years, to preserve its integrity. In an environment characterized by multi-tenancy and the dissociation between hardware and applications, cloud users must be vigilant and understand the risks. In short, you need to make sure that your cloud service provider has a level of physical security and regulatory compliance that meets the needs of your business. You’ll also need to consider what additional measures may be needed to protect against potential threats, including protecting data in transit and at rest. It may also be appropriate in some cases, to keep the database within your data center and put the rest outside in the Cloud.
Management of the two environments
After finally migrating the application to the Cloud, you will find another big obstacle: how to manage it? The cloud and data center are currently two completely separate environments, each with its own set of management tools, and there is no meaningful way to integrate the two. As a result, IT staff will need to learn and use the tools of each cloud provider, in addition to the tools they already have. In addition, they may have to give up some of the control and visibility of its supporting infrastructures available in the data center, at least in current cloud environments. The cloud provider could change the underlying infrastructure (for example, an operating system patch version), to keep the cloud up to date, so the environment could become increasingly different from the local versions over time.
What would happen if you wanted to change Cloud provider or return to the Data Center?
All the effort made is only worth for a Cloud! What happens if another cloud provider comes with lower prices or better service? Since you have invested all the time to set up the application on the Cloud, you will be very reluctant to repeat the entire development and integration process to meet the requirements of the new provider. Many companies would like to have the flexibility to use the cloud and develop and test a new application (reaping the benefits in agility and low cost for research, prototyping, development), before bringing it back to the data center to benefit the production of data, their business processes and infrastructure. Today, it is not possible to move an application between different clouds or return to the data center with ease, with a few clicks of the mouse. For many companies, the goal is to create a federated environment of their data center with one or more clouds, and to move applications and workloads where it is most appropriate.
The cloud offers a great opportunity for business applications, but it’s important to understand the work involved before embarking on a migration, and how the cloud environment will integrate with your existing data center. VMEngine has several solutions planned to address and solve these problems.
