Your Current Environment
The following article outlines what moving servers to Google Cloud Compute, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azure means. Most businesses want to move to the “cloud” but have no idea what that means. If you’re a small business you typically have a couple computers scattered around with one storage device. If you’re a medium or large business you probably already have several servers at a location in a contract. Moving to the cloud is often pitched to businesses using Software-as-a-Service replacing the current system with a web application that runs through your browser. While this is ideal, in most instances it isn’t practical. So you keep paying for a bloated IT infrastructure that is dated, isn’t as reliable, and unable to change with your business needs.
The Solution
Leverage Google Cloud Compute, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azure to move those servers to an enterprise environment. In all businesses, moving your servers will often end up costing between $100 – $400 per server a month depending on your environment and space requirements. When you factor in that there is no capital expenditure, maintenance, or power costs this is a far cheaper solution than your current environment. You also gain a SUBSTANTIAL increase in flexibility, performance, and reliability. So why hasn’t everyone transitioned to these services?
Migration Pains
The main issue is getting to these services. It’s hard to find businesses, technicians, or engineers that will do the migration. The reason for this is very simple… for employee’s they are afraid that their job will no longer be needed, for external help, it is too risky for them to take on the task with a very little reward at the end. So it is finding and hiring the right people to do this. In the end, you should be paying these companies directly.
Pitfalls
- Contracting a company that uses their own hardware and you pay them for substandard service and equipment on a monthly basis.
- Not understanding the extended downtime that is required for moving to these services. If you have 30+ servers it will take months for preparation, transfer time, and deployment.
- Degraded service if you have to work in a hybrid environment. This applies to large migrations, where you have servers with a cloud provider, and local servers connected through a VPN for the extended time it takes to complete the full migration.
- Mass Storage – Most of the cost of using these services come from storage, and typically it’s not till you hit the petabytes that you’d run into ROI issues. As a general rule of thumb, anything less than 1000 Terabytes is more cost-effective using these services.
Conclusion
I think every business should be leveraging this technology. The larger the business the harder the migration will be. Small businesses I’ve done in the course of a day, whereas larger businesses take considerably longer. Stay the course and keep searching for talent capable of helping with this transition. As far as personal preference I enjoy using all three of these major players in the market, but for Website Hosting and Linux boxes I like Google Cloud Compute the most, and for businesses already running Office 365 and Windows Server 2008+ Microsoft Azure makes for the easiest transition.
