Whether your company is moving to the cloud or has an existing cloud infrastructure, a cloud strategy helps employees understand the architecture, procedures and future changes of a cloud hosting strategy.

Cloud strategies are usually put off or ignored until infrastructure changes are needed. It isn’t until someone must document and audit the current architecture that a business realizes the importance of having a cloud strategy prior to an architecture rollout.

Scalability

Scalability is the term used to describe the resilience of the network has to change. Typically, that change is a growing company in need of more resources. Cloud strategies must include future changes in scalability when the company grows. This includes increasing server resources. If the company grows large enough, horizontal scalability is required—meaning resources span several servers to balance loads and support heavy traffic.

Internal or External Support

Companies have the option of using internal resources to manage the cloud infrastructure. Part of a cloud strategy includes determining who will manage network maintenance and outages. The advantage of internal resources is complete control over the network, so the company can make changes at will. With external resources, it’s cheaper, and the cloud hosting company is local to the hardware. The downside is that the IT department must contact someone at the hosting company to make ever change. The choice of internal or external support is determined by the resources and cost needed to maintain the cloud strategy.

Naming Conventions

Internal applications and employees usually use server names for connectivity to various network resources. For this reason, when rolling out a new infrastructure, it’s important to keep naming conventions the same. For instance, when upgrading to a new web server, changing only the server and not the IP allows the website to keep the same DNS settings. This means there is no downtime for a website moving to a new server, because DNS will still point to the same IP address. These little quirks can cost the company revenue during a cloud conversion so if possible, keep the same naming conventions and IP addresses for critical servers.

Data Storage

Data storage has come down in price in the last decade, but for companies that need petabytes of information stored, it can get expensive to host internally. For perspective, consider how personal computers now tap into two or three terabytes in storage. A petabyte is one thousand terabytes, which is a large amount of data storage in today’s market.

Cloud storage allows the company to store this amount of data at a fraction of the cost each month. If the company plans to store large amounts of data, it must be ported over to the cloud host and included into the cloud strategy. The cost associated with this storage is also a factor.

Data and Disaster Recovery Plans

Typically, the cloud host is responsible for a disaster recovery plan, but IT departments should also have a plan of their own when systems fail. This recovery plan can be either calling the cloud host or temporarily moving service to the local office during an outage. Disaster recovery plans include hard drive crashes, server outages, upstream provider outages or environmental effects such as hurricanes or floods.

Testing Before the Conversion

After each aspect of the cloud strategy is mapped out, it’s important to test before rolling out the new infrastructure. Testing can be done by internal IT people, but quality analysis people are essential to finding each bug in the changes. To ensure a smooth rollover, make sure the strategy plan is tested, and that all backups for disaster recovery are verified. Without backup verification, the data can be corrupted in the backup file, which can lead to data loss if the backup is needed after conversion to the cloud.

Although creating a cloud strategy takes more time for the rollout and more resources during conversion, it can be a lifesaver if things go wrong during the process. The plan can ensure that each step is taken and the rollout to the cloud goes smoothly.

Author Bio:
Jennifer Marsh blogs for Rackspace Hosting. Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support to its customers and partners, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing.