Moving To The Public Cloud? 10 Factors To Consider

Moving messaging and collaboration environments to the public cloud is a big decision. There's a lot more to think about than just per-user price or feature sets. Here are 10 factors to consider before making your big move.

Regulatory & Legislative Issues: Security experts continue to maintain that everything from HIPAA to PCI to SOX continues to provide either significant speed bumps and/or roadblocks to public cloud adoption. For example, the new Stored Communications Act recently allowed the FBI to access data without even a warrant or consent. What’s next?
The Cloud is Not Magic: Just because it’s in the cloud doesn’t make it “magic.” And it can be very, very dangerous to assume that it is. Be careful not to believe in the magical cloud — an environment where everything is somehow mysteriously being taken care of and where there’s no need to do the usual maintenance tasks, including worrying about security and/or worrying about ongoing scalability as the company or application grows. Make sure you know what the cloud is and isn’t doing for you.
Geopolitical Intrigue: Foreign governments are creating laws to prevent the storing of data in US-based public clouds due primarily to the Patriot Act. If you are a non-US company or even a US company with large foreign subsidiaries, any public cloud system that does not allow for geographic flexibility and choice for the datacenter location is going to cause problems.
Security Vulnerabilities: All of the price competitive public cloud providers utilize a multi-tentant infrastructure. This means that they are utilizing some sort of a virtualization technology to create multiple slices of a single server as a way of setting up the Guest email or collaboration system. So, what exactly are the unknown vulnerabilities in a shared hypervisor you may ask yourself? We’ve already seen the Gmail has been hacked in China. What’s next?
Hardware Sunk Costs and/or Interdependency: The public cloud becomes more financially interesting assuming that all hardware capex costs can be turned into opex. But what if you already have a significant capex sunk cost? Or, what if you are not able to specifically isolate the infrastructure and usage of your servers and storage between your email and your other enterprise applications?
It’s all about CONTROL: If your IT computing model demands complete control over everything that is running, then the public cloud is not right for you. Some clouds do not even allow your root access. If your model needs detailed control over the amount of memory, CPU, hard drive specs, or the interfaces, then the public cloud might not fit.
If it Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix it: Is your email or IM working “just fine” running in a private cloud or on-premise environment? If so, perhaps the notion of revamping your infrastructure shouldn’t find its way onto your immediate IT road map. After all, Gartner estimates that there are only approx. 5% of the entire population of over 250 million Exchange users who are running some sort of public cloud-based email today!
Service and Support Experience: Does the vendor publish an SLA and/or performance statistics? What kind of support is available? It is often the case that the cost reduction upside of the public cloud receives far too much focus/value vs that of focused expertise and experience in delivering service remotely. At the end of the day, are the cost reductions really worth the potential increase in risk?
Cost of the cloud: How much will a 24x7 operation in the public cloud really cost, especially once you factor in some of the hidden costs such as the need for increased network bandwidth between your various corporate sites and the cloud provider? Some public cloud early adopters are currently actually suggesting that they may be coming close to their tipping point for flipping away from the cloud. In other words, they may be ready to achieve a level of consistent usage to the point where it would make sense to bring their core servers back and use the cloud for elasticity only.
Email Outages are NOT Fail Whale Events: For email and collaborative apps high performance is an absolute must-have. Unlike Twitter, you can’t just post the fail whale graphic to signify that a site and/or application is offline or has an issue because real money is at stake, not just tweets.

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