IT Support, Computer Support, Web Development & Branding

Is your organization considering the move of your critical data and IT services to the cloud providers? Many small and medium size business are already using some form of cloud services. Examples are Office 365, Google for Work, or Dropbox collaboration platforms.

But if you are a large enterprise or public sector organization with complex and distributed applications and workloads, is the cloud a good strategy for your organization?

Many CIO’s are already integrating various cloud services into their organizations’ IT strategic plans. Today’s benefits of the cloud services are indisputable. Once implemented, CIO’s are quick to realize that using cloud services fundamentally changes how their IT organizations operate. And that is just a beginning of the headaches, which could be avoided if the right questions were asked before the cloud services implementations began.

So, what are the questions IT leaders and business owners should ask, before considering of moving their IT services to the cloud?Please note that these questions should be discussed with all IT and business levels within the organization, and not only at the CIO office.

• How does the cloud fit into my organization?
• What services are we planning to get from the cloud?
• Which services are still to be delivered in-house?
• How secure is the cloud service provider, and how secure are their applications?
• How do we secure communication between the cloud and our IT infrastructure?
• Can we integrate user authentication with cloud services?
• Will our internet bandwidth support all extra traffic, which was, until recently, only contained within our datacentre?
• Where is our data stored, and who owns it?
• How do we back up the data once it is in cloud, and is it safe from the external security threats?
• How do we recover our organization’s IT services when the cloud provider experiences an outage?
• How does the cloud provider IT service delivery model fit with our IT operations and change management processes?
• What are the cloud provider Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) and what do they mean to my organization’s internal SLA’s?
• Is our helpdesk equipped and trained to deal with user questions regarding cloud services?

These are just some of the questions which CIO’s should be asking before the sales department informs them that they chose to implement Salesforce CRM platform. And yes, they already started the migration from the current platform, and it cannot be stopped as they need to meet some departmental head deadline.