EDITOR’S QUESTION
Sachin Bhardwaj
Director Marketing & Business
Development, eHosting
DataFort
Before migrating to the cloud, CIOs
need to assess the company’s long-
term business and infrastructure needs,
establish realistic goals and priorities,
set deadlines and consult with finance
directors on IT budgets. This is important
because reversing IT systems is time-
consuming and expensive. Apart from
having an understanding of what resources
are available for implementation and
maintenance,
CIOs should, with proper planning and
strategy, keep the complexity and cost to a
minimum. They need to determine whether
the transition will be managed in-house or
outsourced to a third party vendor.
CIOs need to evaluate both private
and public cloud options and see which
platform best meets their business
requirements. Before moving information
to the cloud, they need to conduct an
internal review with business heads to
identify which data can be moved to
the cloud. Full cloud integration may
cause regulatory compliance issues as
certain data must be secured internally.
Enterprises must also be cautious of
where they store different types of data.
CIOs need to ensure that their
organizations have effective data
recovery and backup management tools
in place in case of any loss during data
synchronization. If the organization has
planned to outsource the migration, it is
important to know if the cloud services
provider has a robust data backup
strategy and recovery procedures.
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INTELLIGENTCIO
While choosing a cloud vendor, it is
important for CIOs to review and evaluate
their security standards, policies and
governance models to ensure that their
organizations’ data is safe, secure and
protected at all times. They must be
aware of procedural and policy differences
between their organization and external
companies and software vendors. They
need to understand where the data will
be stored and comply with the legal
requirements in their own country as
well as the country of the cloud services
provider. Organizations can also consider
a hybrid solution to secure critical data.
We recommend partnering with a cloud
services provider (CSP) who offers service
level agreements (SLAs), 24/7/365 support
and follows security standards, processes
and procedures to get the most value from
a hybrid cloud model. Local CSPs could
provide enterprises with a local data center
and 24/7 bilingual local support.
www.intelligentcio.com