Many of us may already know what a cloud is but may not be familiar with cloud computing. When I was in form 1 I fell in love with geography and I understood almost everything about the clouds. As fate may have it I never pursued geography and I ended up in computer science. In my first year in college, I heard about cloud computing it was very hard for me to unlearn everything I knew about clouds and try to understand how data can be stored in the cloud.

By the time I was graduating, I still could only imagine what cloud computing was. I was lucky to get into the IT industry and deal with massive data and a few years later I had understood what it meant by storing data in the cloud.

In this article I will explain what is cloud computing, why cloud computing and how to move you data to the cloud.

An overview of data and storage

Everyday your organization produces significant amount of data from invoicing, emails, sales transactions, bank transactions, enterprise systems and many other operations.

This data is continuously stored in Hard Disks or Solid State Disks. Sometimes we also use tapes for backups.

The same data is being retrieved and processed either within your organization or outside by your customers and suppliers. The work of the disks is just to store data. For data to be accessible the disks are stacked together inside a server.

A server is a computer with the ability to stack several disks together and process and retrieve data in seconds.

As your organization grows more data is generated and this brings the need for more computing power, this is achieved by clustering several servers together to process your data.

The more servers you cluster together the more complicated it becomes to manage, from cooling issues to load balancing, resource surges, disaster recovery, security and the list goes on.

Cloud computing comes to abstract all this requirements from your so that you can focus on what matters to your business.

What is cloud computing?

In cloud computing, the capital investment in building and maintaining data centers is replaced by consuming IT resources as an elastic, utility-like service from a cloud “provider” (including storage, computing, networking, data processing, and analytics, application development, machine learning, and even fully managed services).

Why Cloud Computing

Scalability & Elasticity: In the cloud, the sky is the limit. You are able to handle traffic as it comes, when the traffic is too high your resources can automatically scale to cope with the traffic and when the traffic slows down the resources are automatically released.

Integrated Solutions: Most cloud providers have integrated several solutions that can help accelerate your business. Analyzing large amount of data, monitoring, logging, managing clusters all this solutions have already been made for you.

Global Scale: Most cloud providers have many points of presence. Your customers can access your systems from anywhere in the world with minimal latency.

Cloud may not be the cheapest or the most secure sometimes it may make more sense to run your own servers on-premise after some critical analysis.

How do you move to the cloud

Strategies differ but approach remains the same

1. Assess: on this stage, you will need to do an infrastructure discovery this is where you assess inventory and dependency and conduct a fact-driven analysis.

Some very helpful tools you can use are:

• Cloud physics
• Stratozone
• Cloudamize

2. Plan

3. Migration wave planning: Migration candidates are grouped considering technical dependencies, business impact and migration efforts required.

• Wave 1: High-value low effort to implement.
• Wave 2: high business value, high effort to implement.
• Wave 3: low business value, low effort to implement.
• Wave 4: low business value, high effort to implement.

Migration strategies:

• Lift and shift – Re-hosting: This is when you move your virtual machine exactly as they are without changing anything.
• Re platforming: Here you might make some few optimization to achieve tangible benefit.
• Re-factoring or Re Architecture: This is typically driven by a strong business need to add features, scale, or performance that would otherwise be difficult to achieve in the application’s existing environment. This the most complex task.
• Replace or Repurchasing: Moving to a different product.
• Retire: This is where you get rid of unwanted or unused resources.
• Retain: leave everything as it is and revisit later.

You are likely to use only one of these technologies.

4. Optimize: Optimization is a continuous journey:

• Assess and Identify
• Learn and share
• Plan and prioritize
• Optimize and measure