­­Non-Technical Cloud Barriers: What Do I ­­Do With My Datacenter?

Some of the most common questions that I receive from customers about moving to the Cloud are centered on the following: 

• How do we justify going to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud solution when we just bought new hardware for our organization? 
• What do I do with my old hardware and datacenter?

These are actually valid questions that businesses should be asking when moving to an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Cloud solution.  AWS has shown to have significant financial saving for most organization over short term and long term analysis; however, supporting current operations and translation of service from on-premise to AWS still has it’s initial investment that are not realized immediately.  JHC Technology recommends the following approaches based on specific organizational business requirements to help transition to AWS while taking advantage of previous datacenter and hardware investments.

Disaster Recovery failover, High Availability Service, and/or Network Extension

Organizations can make use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a disaster recovery failover, high availability service, and network extension (example: Reduce latency for remote offices).  Instead of taking the hard stance of all or nothing, organizations that have already invested into their physical datacenter hardware can still take advantage of AWS to address other business requirement.  Sample business requirements:

• Improve disaster recovery by using AWS regions for failover

• Enhance network performance by bring datacenter closer to the end user

• Development and Test Labs

New Business Requirements and Hardware Refresh

It is unrealistic for some organization to move all datacenter operations 100% to the cloud in a short period of time.  Some reasons are contractual obligations, classification of content, migration complexity, and/or education/skill set of resources.  Understanding these business constraints is extremely important as your organization moves to the cloud and JHC recommends incorporating a methodology that utilizes AWS for new business requirements.  Additionally, implementing a change control process that will allow the organization too slow transition infrastructure/services to AWS during hardware refresh cycles, thus getting the most return on your physical infrastructure investment.

Recycle/Go Green

JHC Technology has designed a process that provides the logistic and recycling capability for customers to recycle/exchange physical infrastructure into financial credits that are used to offset Amazon Web Services costs.  The program is available for international and/or domestic:  Commercial, State, Local Governments, Non-Profits, and Federal Government.  This program allows our customers to recoup investment into datacenters, helping improve the environment, and assists in offsetting cost of AWS.

Check out other blogs in the Non-Technical Cloud Barrier Series.

James Hirmas is the CEO for JHC Technology.  He can be reached at jhirmas(at)jhctechnology.com, @JHC_JamesHirmas, or connect with him on LinkedIn.