How to select and prepare applications for cloud computing

With cloud services, you can bring additional value to customers and employees, and even create new revenue streams. Below we'll show you how to find the right services in your existing applications and get them ready for cloud computing.

Thanks to the success of Amazon EC2, Salesforce and other public cloud services, many companies understand the value of cloud computing. In fact, more and more companies are beginning to try cloud computing. Why not? Start a public cloud service it may be possible to create a new revenue stream with minimal modifications to the existing infrastructure, or to provide convenient self-service to customers. However, the process of starting a cloud service may not be smooth sailing. Enterprise IT managers need to determine which applications can be transferred to the cloud under harsh conditions. In addition, they must create or modify service interfaces or APIs to address new control and security challenges, including the establishment of usage tracking for billing and charging. Have you prepared for the cloud business? What services have you matured to become a cloud service? How do you build a successful business case? How do you create a successful cloud service, whether they are simple or complex? This article will provide some common guidelines for building cloud services, including how to identify, judge, migrate, and validate new and existing application services to transform into real cloud services. With this information, you will have a general idea of how to build a flexible service within or outside the enterprise.

Step 1: Choose the right application for the cloud

Every company has an application that everyone thinks will become a good cloud service. But often the analysis proves that the situation is not what people think it is.

You need to create a business case to demonstrate the advantages of a cloud service that is different from a single application or multiple applications. You need to consider what cloud services are actually? Technical realities need to be considered, including migration costs and performance. In other words, what is the real ROI of cloud services?

To determine the feasibility, you first need to consider the actual value of the application. Understand the use cases of cloud services, such as the following common cases:

1, external customers can obtain order information, including checking order status, delay and upgrade.

2. The company can gain additional profits by renting inventory Control cloud services to other external companies.

3, other departments of the company can effectively access the cloud services are using data, whether it is human to machine or machine to machine, which will promote data quality.

Identifying the problems that potential cloud services can solve is the first step in determining the value of a cloud service. The thing to keep in mind is that in some instances you need to move the entire application. In other instances, you only need to provide some simple services through a Web service agreement.

Once you have identified "cause" and "content" after configuring the cloud service, you need to determine what to do and, more importantly, how much it costs. The cost of migration depends on the status and application architecture of existing applications, as well as what functions you want them to have in their application as cloud services, or exactly like applications.

Obviously, the way to evaluate depends largely on the type of application and the service you are prepared to provide. The following common list of evaluation steps will help you get started:

Evaluate the status of an existing application

Evaluate the current user interface design

Evaluate current security design

Determine how bills are billed based on usage

Assess the extent to which core applications and other redevelopment tasks are modified

Consider the number of internal or external customers that may use the service, and assess what additional schemas may be required

Evaluate what cloud computing needs to be added, such as Autoconfiguration or multi-tenant

Evaluate the cost and input of the Development Service interface

Identify the inputs needed to integrate with existing security systems

Draft test and phase implementation plan

Assess deployment costs, including the infrastructure needed for future expansion.

A general principle is that the older and more complex the application, the higher the cost of cloud migration, and the less economical the cost-effectiveness. At the same time you have to consider the reliability of the technology, such as performance loss. Any internal application will have performance degradation when accessed through an open Internet.

When applying modifications as a cloud service, you should consider the following factors:

Migration costs. This is the cost of modifying applications to meet cloud service requirements. Includes all the new hardware and software needed, as well as adjusting the architecture and design, research and development costs, test resources, deployment costs, and so on.

Risk costs. In other words, if you fail to migrate your application to cloud computing, you will suffer economic losses.

Long-term maintenance costs. Over time, you need to spend a lot of money on maintaining cloud services.

Commercial value. The potential benefits of making applications real cloud services exceed expected revenue, including strategic value, such as being able to upgrade services for existing customer base, and better retain these customers.

In short: The value of cloud services = business value-(risk costs + migration costs + long-term maintenance costs). The time range for this formula is three years.

If an application is transformed into a cloud computing service with $20,000,000 business value, $5,000,000 risk cost, $4,500,000 migration cost, and $2,000,000 long-term maintenance costs, it can be expressed as:

Value/ROI of cloud services = $20,000,000-($5,000,000 + $4,500,000 + $2,000,000)

Therefore, the value of cloud services is approximately $8,500,000. Obviously, this example has proven its own value, and your cloud service transformation is fairly cost-effective.

When making decisions, you should consider what is listed in Table 1:

Figure 1 The following issues should be carefully considered when preparing to create a cloud service:

Identify the advantages that the business brings.

The selected application has a clear and economically viable technical path to provide cloud services.

Ability to define available usage cases.

Ability to integrate based billing systems to measure service usage.

Ability to create a reasonable security architecture to protect critical business information.

Good management methods for data and services.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)