If you have made the strategic decision to migrate to the cloud then it’s recommended for you to have an understanding of how this affects your business internally. This course will look at the different areas of your organization and help give you visibility on how a cloud migration will affect your organization from a business perspective.
We will look at how the dynamics of the Business will change, from adopting new sales approaches to the way in which your conduct your deployment operations, a number of changes can occur internally and it’s good to be aware of them.
Not only are there changes to the operations and processes of your departments, but there are also changes on a deeper and personal level, such as how a migration can affect your employees. A number factors come into play here and some of them can be detrimental to both the business and the employee, we will take a look at each of these.
As with all migrations of one kind or another, there are of course financial implications, we examine topics such as capex and opex, billing, budgets, human resources costs among others, there are a lot of financial changes that can happen within your organization and planning for them can be difficult.
Contractual business obligations play a huge part in the success of your migration, for example do you have the right SLA for your service? Does the cloud vendor offer SLAs that meet your customer requirements? Can you achieve the correct level of security compliance and governance such as ISO or HIPAA compliance? All of these concerns are discussed with suggestions and recommendations.
Finally, we look at some of the business risks encountered when your business goes ahead with a cloud migration, such as the inflexibility of contracts and what happens when or if it goes wrong!
Course Objectives
By completing this course, you will have
- A greater visibility of the impact that cloud computing can have on the internal teams and processes of an organization
- An understanding of how cloud migrations can directly affect your employees
- The knowledge to plan and educate other business areas of key changes that are likely to occur assisting in a smoother migration to the cloud whilst mitigating known risks
This course has been designed for:
- Business Managers
- Project Managers
Pre-Requisites
- A basic understanding of cloud computing and its benefits
- Some exposure to business acumen and team structure
This Course Includes:
- Over 45 minutes of high-definition video
- 7 lectures
- Vendor product documentation links to key topics
What You Will Learn:
Introduction - This provides an introduction to the trainer and covers the intended audience. We will also look at what lectures are included in the course, and what you will gain as a student from attending the course.
Business Dynamics and Procedure - Here we analyze those internal changes that directly affect the way in which departments operate, from sales to business analytics to processes and procedures.
Effects on Your Employees - This lecture looks at both the positive and the negative effects this can have, covering training and career potential to redundancies. We look at these changes from the employee’s perspective.
Financial Impact - This lecture focuses on the different financial effects cloud migration can have, and where these changes will occur.
Contractual Business Obligations - Here you will see how important it is to be aware of any obligations you have to your customers, specifically when it comes to audited security compliances because failure to meet these could have legal consequences.
Business Risks - With change comes risks, and in this lecture we identify where some of these risks can come from and how to best mitigate them.
Summary - Lastly, we will take note of some of the important factors learnt from the previous lectures.
If you have thoughts or suggestions for this course, please contact Cloud Academy at support@cloudacademy.com.
Hello and welcome to this lecture.
There will, of course, be a number of risks when implementing the cloud. In another course, Should Your Business Move to the Cloud?, we looked at some of the constraints which could also be seen as risks. And here, it looks at some of the technical risks that may arise.
In this section, I want to address it more from a business point of view.
Legislation and Regulation.
Your data may be bound by specific regulations, such as the EU data protection laws, which require specific security controls, retention requirements, et cetera, dependent on the data being stored. Other legislations exist where certain data may have to remain within a specific region and cannot be transferred out of those boundaries.
You need to architect your environment to meet these security requirements and mitigate the risk of data being stored in a geographic location that's restricted. Breaches to this legislation could have a legal impact and lead to additional risks against your organization. So it's fundamental that you're aware of your data privacy and storage location laws and regulations.
Technical Ability.
We briefly covered this in one of the previous lectures, so I won't go into any depth. But it's important to point out that the people you need to manage your current infrastructure may not be willing or keen to learn another technology specialization, especially if it doesn't really interest them on a technical or career level.
This becomes a technical ability risk to the business as you will not have the required work force with the adequate skills to confidently help you with the migration of your services to the cloud.
You need to ensure you have a completely new skill set from your employees to a level that has the knowledge to architect, implement, and administer the environment. Without this, your environment will end up failing from a productivity, security, and objective point of view.
Reliance on a Third Party.
Running services on the cloud removes control from your business. The loss of this control brings risks as you're now dependent on them performing their job effectively to manage the underlying architecture that your services are now running on.
Failure on their part could mean failure on yours and to your customers. This is where architecting a high availability solution between different geographic regions is key for critical workloads within the cloud to help mitigate cloud vendor failures. Failures within the cloud vendors does happen and has happened.
For example, this link on the screen shows you an AWS failure where an availability zone went down. Therefore, to help mitigate this risk for high-impacting services, some enterprise organizations are not choosing to adopt services from multi-cloud vendors, for example, from both AWS and Azure in a multi-vendor cloud configuration.
Inflexibility of Contracts.
When signing up to services by the public cloud vendor, you are bound to their customer agreement and terms of use, including any SLAs they offer for their services. As an example, you can find customer agreements for both AWS and Azure via these links on the screen.
To negotiate any specific term around your own special use cases, especially where it may affect SLAs would be very dependent on your support level with your chosen vendor and the amount of resources you intend to use. You may not be in a position to negotiate any changes, and therefore, you stuck with the SLAs and customer agreement terms that are offered.
If you don't like these conditions, then you can either change your business requirements or look at an alternate provider.
The Wrong Strategy Choice.
Okay, so you've moved to the cloud for specific business benefits and requirements. However, six months later, you are realizing that you're not reaching the benefits or goals that you set out to achieve. In fact, you are spending more on your infrastructure than you thought.
Whether it was a failure in your business plan, project management, or deployment of architecture and cost management, it has failed to meet your expectations.
So now what? Do you revert back to an on-premise solution which would cost additional capex, not to mention the cost of migration again? Or do you perhaps change your cloud deployment model? Perhaps you were using a public cloud model, but it may make better sense to use a hybrid cloud model. Maybe some of your applications and services could be better deployed through a Platform as a Service solution instead of an Infrastructure as a Service solution.
There will always be a risk of did we do it right? And the likelihood is the first time will not be right and you will adapt and change how your cloud services are deployed. You need to factor this learning period into your deployment and understand these changes.
Technology Advances.
The cloud provider is continually working to attain the highest level of technological advancements and this results in an ever-changing flow of their live services.
This doesn't always work in the favor of the business, as your applications and services that are deployed on top of these may have to have a slight modification to keep up with the different feature sets, which could affect your business services.
Shared Infrastructure.
Although the use of shared infrastructure is what helps to maintain a low price point for resources, it also acts as a potential security risk. For workloads that are of high sensitivity, it may require the use of dedicated hosts and tenancy, meaning that no other customer could store data on the same physical host.
The security applied on shared hosts is extremely high and operates at a number of different layers in the host and the hypervisor. However, should any breach to these areas, specifically the hypervisor, then in theory, customers could access each other's data.
Personally, I've not heard of this kind of breach happening within the leading cloud providers, but sometimes your business may not be able to take that risk for data that meets a certain criteria.
You will likely come across many more business risks within your own organization and it's important to define what these are and to understand how to mitigate those risks as much as possible.
That brings us to the end of this lecture. In our final lecture, we shall review some of the important points we have covered so far throughout this course.
Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.
To date, Stuart has created 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.
Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.
He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.
In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.
Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.