Several surest ways to spoil the Cloud

Many companies are having great success with cloud computing, and it’s evident that the market continues to grow quickly. Here are three surefire ways to fail with cloud computing and what you can learn from them to avoid suffering that same fate.

First, put the wrong people on the project. This is the most common way that cloud computing development, migration, and implementation projects fail. Cloud computing is a hyped “cool” space. Those who have the most political clout in an IT organization quickly position themselves on cloud computing projects. However, just because they are buddy-buddy with the CIO does not mean they have the architectural and technical skills to make the cloud work for the enterprise. Bad decisions are also made in terms of deciding how to select technology types and technology providers. When you select what’s popular versus what’s a true architectural fit, you shoot yourself in the foot.

Second, security is an afterthought. This means that those driving the project do not consider security and compliance requirements until after deployment. It’s almost impossible to retrofit security into a cloud computing deployment, so the approach and use of technology (such as encryption) should be systemic to the environment. This is a rookie mistake.

Third, select the wrong business problem to solve with cloud computing. The right approach is to pick new application development or existing application migration that is meaningful to the business, but that is not mission-critical. There are two paths to failure here. The first is to pick the “kill the business with a single outage” type of application, put it in the cloud, then pray to the Internet gods that nothing goes wrong. Too risky. The second is to pick a meaningless application that nobody cares about, move it to the cloud, and hope that somebody notices. Too underwhelming. Find something that falls in the middle.

Hope, you’ll find the tips above useful.