Decision goal to go for Cloud hosting

Design decision is very important while working on Cloud. Which platform you are going to choose, or based on your organization roadmap how you are going to setup your platform. All these decisions are critical for a successful story. Decisions are taken based on the requirement you have and based on the metrics hosting provider can provide. Let's make it simple way on how to start and then pursue.

Organization willing to go for Cloud for mainly several reasons. One of the important reason it saves a lot of cost to them.  The main objective is to store their data, let their application run just like it is running on their premise and ensure data security. So, let's break it in following simple blocks.

• Infrastructure/Data storage
• Security
• Performance
• Governance & Monitoring
• Value Added Service

Let's explore our first point  - Infrastructure/Data storage. What does it make sense to us? What exactly it can provides. And then we need to find out what are their metrics level on ground level feature/capacity metrics.

• Computation capacity with price model (CPU, In-Memory, Disk Storage)
• Storage - Disk, SQL(Relational and non-relational support), Blob, File, Object etc
• Platform can run - What types of OS it can support
• What features it covers for dynamic growth - Like elasticity, Scale out is automated manner
• Speed, Latency, Data Center locations
• Applications interfaces - VMs, App Service, Serverless computing model, Application Interfaces

Now, let's' explore second one - Security. It is most important area. Security must covers Data, Network, and Application.

• Encryption/Decryption
• Identity Management System
• Active Directory, SSO
• Role BAsed Security
• Align with latest security policy
• Ability to protect network threat protection and proactive remediation
• Ability to display organization security stands real time in a single dashboard and let people to manage it effectively

Our next review zone is Performance. The rule of thumb here to verify the performance micro level and note down what you get in real time scenario. Literally week performance can bring down your business model.

• Response time
• I/O speed
• Recovery time
• Network performance(middleware or other interfaces)
• Latency
• Application steadiness
• Data In/Out time
• CPU/VM performance
• Computational performance
• App/Serverless computing performance

Every organization do have some policy and they want to maintain that in correct way. Governance & Monitoring features of my hosting provider should allow me to accomplish my task.

• Governance and Monitoring Dashboard
• Interfaces/UI to implement rules, check points etc
• Configuration Management
• Continuous updates on security/performance/latest change which should bring to notice
• System Maintenance/Disaster recovery updates
• Updates on idle resources
• Updates on malfunctioning or super usage resources with report data
• Logs data, performance report, RCA

Value Added Service is a vast area to cover. Different organizations will provide different features and value and you need to be find out how much you can utilize those feature for your organization. Important aspect as it could make your life easier. Also definitely you want everything under a single roof.

• Compute Big Data feature
• Data Analytics and with reporting service
• Machine learning capabilities
• Templates features
• Automation support
• Renowned 3rd party Tools integration
• Easy to configure and go
• Service Support - with quality and ontime
• Capacity to manage my business growth
• Digital Enablement
• Serverless Model Driven features
• IoT

Landing any Cloud platform for organization, we can save on-prem hardware, software and operational cost on yearly basis. And by making a right decision what is saved yearly and how much it benefit to us. We'll have a core cost and also we can have how a good implementation growth our organization business in new landscape.