Getting ready to move your operations to the cloud? Make sure your on-premise environment is efficient first, or you’ll just drag those inefficiencies with you to the cloud.
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At Logicalis, we strongly recommend our clients perform remediation of their systems before making the jump to the cloud, to eliminate these inefficiencies and ensure a smoother move to off-premises systems.
We typically see remediation having the most impact on these systems:
- Virtualization: Remediation of virtual environments is directly related to remediation of management abilities through the development and execution of ITIL best practices as part of an IT service management (ITSM) strategy. Research shows that a typical IT environment is only about 50% virtualized. That clearly leaves the other 50% to be virtualized. The ROI and other benefits of extending virtualization are well established. But companies also need to rationalize the systems they have already virtualized. It is common to see organizations with 100 physical servers that have been transformed into 200 or more virtual servers. Because virtual machines have the same support, security and compliance issues that physical machines do, the cost of server sprawl can be significant.
- Blade Servers: Throughout the data center, blade technology has initiated change. Blades are modular, need fewer cables, require less floor space, use less power, require less cooling and can be managed by integrated management tools. These and other dramatic efficiencies have enabled the blade form factor to take the data center by storm. Additionally, an investment in the blade chassis is protected over time because additional blades can always be added.
- Converged Storage: Rather than buying more storage than is needed “just to be sure,” as many IT departments do, CIOs need to carefully select a specific storage solution that meets the company’s current needs, yet leaves future options open. Converged storage area networks (SANs) for virtual server farms, for example, allow IT pros to assign virtual storage and provide high availability with commands from the hypervisor environment the way they manage virtual servers. It’s important, however, to keep an eye on where storage is headed. Recent advancements in flash and direct-attached storage may soon provide services that were traditionally only supported through a SAN.
Next steps: Take a quiz to gauge your organization’s readiness for the cloud, or complete our cloud readiness assessment for a more detailed look at your systems.