The decision to adopt cloud is based on assessing your goals, the perceived benefits of cloud, and the potential risks and costs. Once you’ve completed the move to cloud, it’s important to assess whether you’re getting the results you hoped for.
Metrics for Assessing Cloud
The metrics you evaluate will depend on your specific goals. You should collect metrics in your existing environment first, to have a baseline for comparison.
Performance and Support Goals
If your primary goal in adopting cloud was reducing downtime and minimizing the time you spend on support, track cloud uptime, the number of incidents, and how long the incidents take to resolve. You should compare these statistics to the level of service promised by the cloud provider’s service level agreement.
Spending Goals
If you were primarily driven to adopt cloud in an effort to reduce IT spending, evaluate your cloud spending. This can be challenging as cloud costs are operating expenses while many on premises costs are capital expenses. Don’t forget to consider the money you save by not purchasing spare capacity in advance as you would in your own data center as well as costs such as rent and power for the data center, along with staffing and training costs.
Improved Utilization
Much of the capacity in traditional data centers is unused, idle spare capacity held in reserve to handle peak demands. Using cloud reduces or eliminates that requirement, so measure the actual utilization of instances and storage.
Increased Agility
One of the best benefits of cloud is how rapidly you can respond to change, so monitor the time to provision and respond to requests for new services. You can also track the number of virtual machines and changes in the number of cloud services utilized. Compare how cloud supports bursting to how you dealt with spikes in demand on premises.
Simplified IT Management
Compare the level of automation of your cloud to the level of automation in your data center. Evaluate the number of procedures your team needs to perform in the cloud compared to the number of responsibilities they had in your data center.
Moving to the cloud doesn’t guarantee you’ll achieve your cloud computing goals. Get support every step of the cloud journey from dcVAST. Our breadth and depth of expertise in cloud and related IT infrastructure technologies ensures you get the most advantage from your cloud systems. Contact us to learn more about getting value from moving your IT to the cloud.
