What To Ask About Hybrid Clouds

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

ScienceLogic provides key questions CIOs need to ask for hybrid cloud deployments.

As more and more healthcare organizations consider deployment of the hybrid cloud, ScienceLogic offers guidance for CIOs facing deployment and expansion challenges. In the white paper The 20 Hybrid Cloud Questions Every IT Leader Should Be Asking, ScienceLogic addresses 20 important questions covering four critical areas: migration to the cloud, security in a cloud-enabled world, costs, and visibility.

Using these questions as a guide, CIOs can arm themselves to carry out successful hybrid IT implementations in their organizations.

Here are 10 of the most pressing questions CIOs should consider:

1. How Much Will This Migration Cost? While moving to the cloud shifts budgets, it does not necessarily save absolute dollars. Be sure to tally the savings in time to market and calculate the ROI.
2. Why Migrate To Cloud From In-House? Migration should be considered on an application by application basis.  While some applications, like business intelligence, analytics, mobile, digital marketing, CRM, and email, are easy to move to the cloud, it is more difficult to migrate customized compliance-centric legacy applications.
3. What Security and Assurances Should You Look For? A recent CIF Study found that 98 percent of companies have never experienced a breach of security when using a cloud service. ScienceLogic suggests securing partners that offer intrusion detection and prevention, single sign-on with authenticated devices, multi-factor authentication, encryption, secure VPN, private subnets and more.
4. What are the Risks For Information Security and Data Sovereignty? Be sure to find out the cloud provider’s focus on regulatory compliance and related accreditations.
5. Do You Know Your Total Cost of Ownership? (TCO) Be sure to factor in all historical costs that are being eliminated by the IaaS deployment to calculate your true TCO.
6. What is the Right Payment Model For Your Cloud Deployment? Cloud platforms often offer spot prices, on-demand pricing, and reserved instances, according to ScienceLogic.  Be sure that the payment model fits your needs.
7. How Do You Optimize For Cost and Scale? Leverage tools that show cost thresholds alongside performance metrics as well as offer some understanding of risk, especially when deploying on shared infrastructure.
8. Is the Service Health and Performance Of Your Workloads Uncompromised? ScienceLogic advises that you need not only visibility and control of the physical IT infrastructure, but also the ability to correlate data metrics in intelligent ways that illuminate the health and risk a critical service will face.
9. What Should You Be Asking of Your Service Providers? Discuss the response time of the web service, how often a retry is allowed, retention policies, number of copies, and about a tiered credit guarantee with higher credits for lower service levels delivered, ScienceLogic suggests.
10. Can the Proper People, Process, and Tools Meet All These Demands? The short answer is yes. ScienceLogic notes that CIOs and their organizations need skilled, up-to-date IT staff, armed with the tools that everyone needs that are easy to use.

As ScienceLogic concludes, “The CIO’s best strategy for successful deployment in the cloud is, stated simply, to have a strategy in place.  That process requires assembling knowledgeable IT staff, which may involve some continuing education.  Making your internal deployment groups and your external Cloud Service Provider/System Integrator part of the process is also key to a successful migration to or expansion of any hybrid cloud environment. Most importantly, asking the right questions ahead of time will save you from learning embarrassing answers later.”