Credit Union Cloud Part 12: Migration
Credit Union Cloud Migration
If you have been following our Credit Union Cloud series we are getting near the end. The last post, Credit Union Cloud Security, addressed the financial impact cloud computing will have on Credit Unions. In this post we address how a Credit Union will migrate to the cloud. By definition, Cloud is a remote service. Typically a customer will access the cloud resources over their Internet connection. Or a customer might have a dedicated private circuit to their cloud provider if performance or privacy issues dictate. Ultimately, you should make sure that however you are getting to the cloud has redundancy and resiliency built into the solution.
If you are thinking about getting out of the technology business, focusing on your core competencies, and doing what you do best – Cloud Computing might be for you. That being said – there are number of considerations in the decision. There are essentially two options for moving to the cloud – phased in over time or the all in approach.
All in Approach
In our opinion – this approach is really only for small businesses of around 10 to 50 employees or businesses that have very little technical complexity. If this describes your business it is a pretty easy transition. Move your e-mail accounts, your phones and a few documents – and you should be good to go. Start by figuring out how many employees you have, which applications (word, project, adobe etc) they have and how much file server data you have today. Then you should be able to get a quote and explore how to do the migration.
Phased Approach
If you have more than 25 employees you will want to look closer at how you will move the cloud. If you want to move overtime – we recommend picking a key piece of infrastructure such as Telecom, VOIP, Disaster Recovery, or Messaging and moving those to the cloud first. With each of these you will most likely integrate your existing or legacy infrastructure with your trusted secure cloud provider.
Five Starting Points
By starting at one of these points you should be focusing on making sure you are building the appropriate roads and directions to eventually move everything over. For example, in integrating your telecom you can ensure you get the redundancy and performance from your cloud provider. The right solution will provide scalable bandwidthwhile reducing risk of carrier inter opperability problems. In short being on the same network as your cloud provider avoids a lot of long-term performance problems. In integrating VOIP or Messaging you will most likely integrate your Active Directory environment with your cloud providers. This should improve performance and security while off-loading work to the cloud. In addition – once you are federated with your provider moving additional servers and infrastructure should be seamless in the future. All in all, taking baby steps can be a great way to try out and get comfortable with your cloud provider and make sure you have the right co-sourcing provider long-term.
How to start the Analysis
- Contracts – put a list of all your IT related contracts together (software licensing, telecom, hardware, etc.)
- End Dates – Identify all of the contract end dates
- Depreciation – Identify your equipment depreciation schedule
- Employees – Figure out how many employees you have and what applications they need to do their job
- Data – determine how much data you have
Take all of this data and put all of your contracts and depreciation information in date order. Analyze year increments and develop a 3 or 5 year plan to slice of pieces and move them to the cloud.
Next up is the end of the Credit Union cloud series and we will be address Credit Union Cloud Staffing Impacts: Part 13.
While security concerns are most commonly sited as the main obstacle, we think that Credit Union staffing impacts are the other major fear. In some ways, Credit Union cloud will undeniably change technology staffing in Credit Unions. However, we believe it will be a net positive impact on those IT Teams and this post will share our beliefs on what will happen.
So if you are thinking about moving to the cloud – stay tuned as we cover a lot of the high-level topics that will influence how you and your Credit Union evaluate your Credit Union Cloud options. Do you have a colleague that you think would benefit from this series – if so please forward this to them!
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