PUBLIC CLOUD ADOPTION PHASES FOR SMBS

There is a strong demand for cloud adoption by SMB for cloud-based server capacity, information and database management, security, system and user access management, ERP, CRM and collaboration tools. Figure shows the phases that one has to go through while selecting and transitioning the services to cloud. Throughout the adoption process, you need to focus on the areas of trust, security, legal, compliance and organizational issues.

1. Analysis Phase: Analysis phase is the first phase. While adopting cloud in organization, the organization must first analyze the need to use the cloud and at what extent the company is able to shift to cloud and able to bear the cost of cloud services. Organization must also identify possible cloud application candidates such as, the impact of migrating to the cloud and do an analysis of the existing systems, applications and business processes.

2. Planning: Planning is the most crucial phase in adoption before purchasing of any cloud services. Planning phase helps to set the direction and objectives for adopting cloud computing. The management team chooses the platforms for deployment and the infrastructure finance, plans, security and legal issues. Improper planning may leads to increase in cost or unsuitable establishment of required services.

3. Adoption: Adoption phase is concerned with purchasing of the services planned during planning phase. In this phase, firstly the vendor for the particular service is selected and these services are taken from selected cloud vendor. In this phase, work on application integration with cloud platforms and infrastructure, outsourcing strategies, SLAs, security policies and legal compliance management is done. This phase sets the stage for migration of the selected applications and systems to the cloud.

4. Migration: After adopting the cloud services from vendors, the organization requires to shift their working over cloud services. Migration phase helps with migration of user data and application to the cloud. The users start using the cloud services. The management must ensure adequate technical and user support during the migration process.

5. Management: Management is the last phase and is ongoing processes that never end. This phase involved to identify document and evangelize best practices. The cloud platform and services must be adequately maintained. Local and remote support and monitoring teams must be put in place.

Roles of individual and organizational users and their interaction with cloud provider Figure 16

Cloud services are demanded by computing and IT administrators, software vendors and end users.

The above figure introduces five level of cloud players.

At the top level, individual users and organizational users demand very different services.The application providers at the SaaS level serve mainly individual users.

Most business organizations are serviced by IaaS and PaaS providers.

The infrastructure services (IaaS) provide the compute, storage and communication resources to both applications and organizational users.The cloud environment is defined by the PaaS or platform providers. Cloud services rely on new advances in machine virtualization, SOA, grid infrastructure management and power efficiency.

Consumers purchase such services in the form of IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. Many cloud entrepreneurs are selling value added utility services to massive number of users.

The cloud industry leverages the growing demand by many enterprises and business users to outsource their computing and storage jobs to professional providers.The provider service charges are often much lower than the cost for users to replace their obsolete servers frequently.

Five Major Cloud Platforms and their Service Offerings

The above figure shows IaaS, PaaS and SaaS models which allow the users to access services over the internet relying entirely on the infrastructures of cloud service providers.

These models are offered based on various SLAs between the providers and the users.

SLAs are more common in network services as they account for the QoS characteristics of network services. For cloud computing services, it is difficult to find a reasonable precedent for negotiating an SLA.

The SLA for cloud computing address service availability, data integrity, privacy and security protection.