The following is a checklist that I have started to develop in support of some of my customers which are considering whether to continue with on-premise services or to move to a private- or public-cloud. It’s a work in progress so if you have any suggestions, please feel free to add on.
| Topic | Definition | Public Cloud | Private Cloud | On Premises |
| Specialized Support Staff | One of the appealing aspects of hosted services is most hosting companies have highly skilled engineers performing the day-to-day operations of their infrastructure.The downside of the hosting services is, those administrators are not only supporting your environment but, also hundreds in not thousands of other infrastructures as well. | X | X | |
| RTOs, RPOs, and SLAs | With moving an infrastructure off premises, most hosting companies provide reduction of cost or refunds if RTOs, RPOs, and SLAs are not met by the hosting company. The only downside to this is the higher the requirements the more money each mailbox will cost. | X | X | |
| Reduction in the cost of power | Removing servers and storage offsite will greatly reduce the cost of power. | X | X | |
| Reduction in the cost of your support staff | Moving an infrastructure to the cloud will eliminate the need for engineer training, workspace, and any other cost associated with maintaining onsite support staff. | X | X | |
| No more paying overtime or comp time for server maintenance or disaster situations | The hosting company is responsible to maintaining firmware and drivers for the systems and planning and testing those changes.
The customer is also removed from situations of providing overtime and comp time during catastrophic failures within the infrastructure. |
X | X | |
| Additional design considerations | When placing services in the cloud, part of your infrastructure will still be local and part of your infrastructure will be remote. This change will alter design and deployment decisions of current and future applications. | X | ||
| Sensitive data is stored offsite | This is a sticking point for most customers that we talk to about moving services offsite. Email data for example contains sensitive information, and placing that data outside the physical walls of their datacenter is a breaking point. | X | ||
| Current investment of hardware and software | Many customers that we go visit have invested millions of dollars on servers and storage. Most Federal customers cannot just re-sell the hardware and recoup their money. On top of that, the customers have existing contracts with hardware vendors for support and maintenance.Customers have also invested time and money in deploying their back-end infrastructure to support key services.
During the cost analysis of moving to a hosted solution, we take these factors into consideration. |
X | ||
| Integration with 3rd party and in-house applications | In-house and 3rd party applications a lot of times are not support when moving services to the cloud or are more costly in terms of usage.A common example is an application that relays mail off an Exchange server. In an on-premises deployment the SMTP message will be transferred over the LAN connection which is normally cheap in cost. Using the same scenario, relaying an email message to an Exchange server that is offsite (if this is even allowed) costs a lot more because that message has to leave your LAN network and travel over a WAN connection to the hosting companies LAN network. | X | ||
| New support challenges of moving data off-premises | Not to address all the issues but, some of the core problems was outage or slowness of WAN/Internet connection causing no or limited connectivity for end-users, where in the past if a problem were to occur with the WAN/Internet connector end users were still able to access email data from their email client. Another common problem is poor performance of services because unexpected actions of other tenants or unexpected habits of your end-users. | X | ||
| Canned services | Hosting companies normally provide a list of services that are available and if a customer wants additional service as request must be made and there is always a possibility that the request will be rejected by the hosting company. |