Case: Pharmaceutical companies sing the praises of the public cloud

Even now, many companies are struggling with cloud migration, but one drug company has eliminated its own private data center five years ago and turned into the embrace of the public cloud.

Amag is an American company with 150 employees, 80 servers and 9TB of data that can be moved between public clouds at will, and three months ago, when it moved from NaviSite to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

"The biggest flexibility of the cloud is that it's easy to terminate a contract with a vendor," said Nathan McBride, Amag it vice president and chief Cloud architect, in Cloud Expo's speech.

McBride declined to describe in detail why it moved from one provider to another, but presented its current proposal for a vendor, hoping that the vendor would develop a short, AWS-based analysis platform for AMAG.

"We give manufacturers one months to come up with new features," McBride said, and if Amag's needs are not met within that timeframe, they will seek another vendor.

Although the migration of the public cloud is complex, amag data migration is actually easy, McBride said. His company uses tools from Vaultlogix to speed data transfer, and NaviSite and AWS have tools to import workloads from other clouds.

At the same time, "all the money is not spent on the server, it is used to buy dark fiber in our city," he said, so performance is not a problem for users and applications to connect to the public cloud, which has three DS3 connections operating in an office building that can be dealt with immediately if it fails.

But if Internet access fails completely in the office building, the business continuity strategy is simple: go home and access the Internet from there.

The implementation of this state takes months of planning, and McBride points out that saving money is not the initial goal of the project. Instead, the amag three-person IT team wants to make its "common infrastructure" made up of Microsoft's Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint, and print and file servers for more agility. The cloud allows the company to better support acquisitions and mergers, and there is no dispute that improves employee productivity.

Although cost is not a priority option, McBride's IT budget was only $4.1 million when it was amag in 2008. Now the range is between 750,000 and 800,000 dollars.

McBride that the most intractable problem with public cloud migration is identity and access management. The company has also completed an assessment of the Active Directory environment, but the cloud also needs two-factor authentication and auditing.

Instead of active Directory, end users log in to Google Apps, or they can authenticate them in the cloud. McBride said his goal was to get the so-called machine factor certification, replacing the password with the unique ID of each mobile phone, but he felt it would not be possible until 2015.

Most amag have been transferred to the public cloud, and if conditions are available, McBride says the entire enterprise will go into the cloud. But at present the Finance department uses Microsoft Dynamics to carry on enterprise resource plan, independent of IE and LDAP.

This also reflects the overall market state: There are still difficulties in moving key core financial applications to the cloud. For many other companies, the value proposition of full access to the public cloud is also a problem.