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The Journey to a Secure Cloud
by Brian Ott
Like the old saying goes, “All journeys begin with taking the first step”. There are many paths to get into cloud computing but how do you know which is right for you?
This is not another checklist of the top things to do and you will magically be on the right road to secure cloud computing. It is much more complex than just following a “top ten” list of steps. The following are some of the foundational activities we did in preparation for Unisys to establish our path to leverage a Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) on our way to the secure cloud. You can follow these same actions to create your “own” path to the secure cloud that fits your enterprise.
The first thing you need to do is to truly understand your business and IT strategy and put it into a documented format so you can understand the relationships between your goals, your problems, and the potential opportunities you can leverage. You should be able to link and analyze the opportunities to show how they will solve the problems to help you meet your goals. These should all have measurements tied to them so you can create some type of business case and risk based analysis for the trade offs of the options.
Another critical dependency is the requirement to understand what you already have in place to support your business from an IT standpoint. This is more than a basic inventory of systems and applications. You need to understand the current computing power, current consumption of resources, current application workload demand, current energy consumption, and current storage and network usage at a minimum.
The next thing to do is to create a projection of the future workload demand in logical groupings by the type of application, type of business functions supported, type of processing required, network routing requirements, and other key dimensions. This is a critical step to drive the analysis of the most appropriate types of workloads that can benefit from secure cloud computing and which should be delivered with other technology architectures.
Once you have these fundamental steps in place, you are ready to define your own path to the secure cloud. The good news is there are many proven approaches and tools to help you quickly get these steps completed. I will share more details and future steps in upcoming blogs.
“I welcome the opportunity to share more details of the Unisys IT transformation approach and results to date”. Let me know if you have any questions or are interested in a more detailed discussion.
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