Making the Transition to Private Cloud

Although the concept of private cloud is still new to the IT realm, it has become very common for companies to realize all the advantages of moving away from the traditional server infrastructure to something that offers the redundancy and flexibility of secured cloud. But, even though this latest technology is very powerful, IT executives usually have no idea as to how they will guide their company to transition to this brand new infrastructure in an easy and fast way. In fact, for many of them, this particular IT area is uncharted waters, a project that requires them to make one big step to the unknown.

A secured cloud calls for a specialized IT technical expertise not just for building the infrastructure but also for maintaining and managing it as a careful benefit or cost analysis to grow and size your cloud together with your company.

Even though this kind of cloud service can ease concerns of regularity compliancy and data security that are typically associated with its public counterpart, there are lots of planning that should go into transitioning to a private one. For this reason, it is not a big surprise that there are companies that feel hesitant with the thought of going private with their cloud.

Good thing that there are some easy steps that will ensure you a steady move toward your ultimate goal of transitioning your entire IT infrastructure to secured cloud.

While it might seem daunting from an IT platform to another, this doesn’t mean that this is a kind of project that should be done all at once. Oftentimes, it is much easier to move slowly to secured cloud since your IT team will become more familiar with virtualization and how you can make the most out of its benefits.

• Your first step is to decide if you like to keep things in house or outsource this to a reliable data center provider. Ask yourself if you have the experience or expertise with virtualization to go DIY or if it is going to be wiser to outsource this expertise to a company specializing in this field. Provider of secured cloud can often make the transition process faster and smoother than when you decided to have your very own data center. Depending on your chosen provider, they can even give regulatory compliance at lesser cost and extremely cost effective options for disaster recovery.
• Decide on the particular specs of your very first host server. As you prefer parity in every host server box you need, decide on uniform processor speed is important. You will find it easy to add a new processor or more RAM but replacing or adding local disk can be more difficult or complex unless there is a SAN attached storage.
• Decide on the virtualization platform you will use. Would you feel more comfortable with well known names or would you prefer something more affordable? This decision is going to be based on the strategic IT mission cost, resiliency, and security needed for applications in your company.