An issue perhaps even more critical, however, is the future termination of a contract with a cloud provider. Organisations need to carefully consider how to get their data back if the provider runs out of steam, or if things just don’t work out. According to Tomkin, expecting a marriage made in heaven is not a wise business decision.
“To take the simple example of email: If you’re not happy with that email service, how do you get the data back? The information may be stored in a propriety format, and, in fact, you don’t even know how many copies are stored, and where those copies are,” he explained.
“You have to consider – would you get help with this from your provider? In most cases, the answer is no, they’ll leave it up to you, and often it’s quite difficult to migrate data from one service provider to another.”
AVOIDING CHAOS
At the smaller end of town, SMBs and mediumsized enterprises embracing cloud services are encountering a few unique challenges of their own.
The first is a lack of cohesion among an organisation’s infrastructure. Even at the most basic level of the operating system, an SMB might have any number of different versions running prior to transitioning to the cloud, and this can cause headaches.
According to the managing director of Sydneybased integrator HubOne, Nick Beugeard, this chaos stems from the prevalence of Windows XP. Organisations that didn’t move to Vista haven’t refreshed the desktops in as many as five or six years, which created a diverse desktop community.
“When they move to the cloud, the biggest problem is going to be getting the users to start using cloud services and getting their systems configured, rather than any big problems migrating lots of data or moving services across,” Beaugeard said. Small to medium businesses also need to work through the typical problems at an infrastructure level to get a cloud service running smoothly, but that said, once the initial hurdles have been jumped, it’s often an easier process for the vendor and integrator.
“The organisations that are less mature, have poor IT, no change control and so on, actually have a far more successful initial cloud migration – they’re basically moving from a totally unmanaged environment to having parts of their environment really well managed,” Beaugeard said.
Depending on the size of the organisation, the migration process can be reasonably short. HubOne claims it recently took a 50-user organisation based in Orange, NSW into the cloud in just two weeks.
It’s a process that HubOne has run through numerous times, speeding up migration time for subsequent customers.
The biggest challenge for the Microsoft partner is not the migration itself, but convincing the customer that it’s a safe move – both for the organisation and its IT staff.
