Cloud Hosting Article

Hosting applications in the cloud requires consideration of a lot of factors, least of which are to assess the risks of cloud computing and have clarity on data protection and security.

Best practices for contracting cloud services also include consideration of network needs. The more a business can keep the data transfer to being within the application and not between the application and the screen, the more suitable an application is for the cloud.

Another factor – and best practice – is whether the application will be used by people outside of the organization. If that is indeed the case, moving the application to the cloud provides benefits including moving network needs off of the network and it creates separation between the company’s network and the application.

“The more you can keep the data transfer to being within the application and not between the application and the screen, the more suitable your application is for the cloud,” Justin James explained in a TechRepublic blog post.

Scaling needs is another critical consideration for organizations considering cloud hosting to meet their IT objectives. Applications that need to scale will do very well in a cloud environment since cloud is able to provide organizations with resources on demand.

Not all applications are created equal, which means that not all of them can just be deployed on a server in the cloud and run. But if the application runs strictly on standardized technologies such as Windows or Linux, it’s a viable candidate for the cloud.

With the amount of storage businesses need today, cloud is an ideal solution as organizations deal not only with capacity issues, but also backup and I/O speeds. Applications with the most demanding storage needs are the kind organizations want to send into the cloud.

As for economic factors, it also critical for organizations to consider their business model and whether it can monetize users in a way that scales with cloud costs.

On the legal side of the equation, it’s paramount for IT decision makers to take a more sophisticated approach to cloud computing contracts by thinking about the longer term cloud strategy and purchase a secure solution.