The Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud located in the company’s Virginia data center crashed on February 28, 2017, causing many of the largest sites and apps on the internet to slow or stop working entirely. Amazon referred to the incident as an “increased error rate” at the time and has now traced the issue to a mistyped command by an Amazon employee.
The outage highlights what many cloud vendors don’t want their clients to know, that some assets are actually better kept on-premise. While the cloud may be extremely beneficial to certain applications and technologies, others are ill suited or currently impossible to move to a cloud environment.
Without careful planning of cloud migrations, organizations can lose substantial value in their previous investments in hardware and application licenses & subscriptions as they develop their future strategies. Opportunities for substantial savings can be easily missed when transition teams are unaware of unpublicized special deals that many vendors are willing to accept.
Eliot Colon, Senior VP at Miro said “Companies are increasingly coming to Miro to ask about the ‘pros and cons’, as well as potential ‘gotcha’s’ of moving from on-premise to cloud deployments. They are mostly concerned about ROI, cost and contractual jargon. Unexpected outages and security issues are real and occur even in the largest and most secure cloud deployments.”
Migrating assets from on-premise solutions to the cloud can cause problems as well as solve them. Cloud architecture can lower costs through increased efficiencies, but it also can spread risks in terms of security and downtime. Where on-premise assets are small, isolated targets, the new cloud platforms are high profile opportunities for hackers. Even if it’s not your IT assets being targeted, they can suffer collateral damage when sharing space with affected systems.
The cost advantage of using cloud solutions has also decreased over time. As cloud vendors have seen their licensing profits decrease, they are increasing their cloud costs to make up for the lost revenue.
Customization is also an increasingly difficult issue for organizations looking to migrate to the cloud. Where the one-size-fits-most model of cloud services works well for many organizational needs, it does not meet them all. Cloud products often don’t provide the detailed performance information in many cases needed to maximize efficiencies and understand exactly how the systems are running.
If you’re considering a cloud transition or moving to a hybrid environment, contact Miro consulting to learn which assets work best in the cloud, which assets should stay on premise, and how to get the best possible price and terms.
About Miro:
Miro consulting specializes in software audit defense, license management, subscription management and cloud services for Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe. Contact Miro by emailing ContactUs@miroconsulting.com, or by phone at 732-738-8511 x1208 or online at MiroConsulting.com.