Moving to the Cloud From on-Premises IT

In a rapidly growing world of information technology, the variety of IT solutions, tools and services is growing every day. How can we keep up and how can we focus on providing the best solution to functional units?

For many years, the provision of information technology to FAO was centralized and more traditional. The infrastructure is centralized via a corporate data center, the software is developed on an ad hoc basis to meet the ever-changing needs of the business, and it is increasingly difficult to cope with such dynamic demand. .

One of the tracks under consideration is cloud-based solutions. Moving to the cloud poses many challenges and we need to analyze various criteria before we get started. In this article, I will discuss some of the key considerations taken into account by the IT division. Cloud technology is not new and is becoming the dominant model in computing. Unfortunately, the lack of knowledge about cloud solutions has been the main challenge for most organizations.

FAO has a traditional IT infrastructure with a centralized data center in each of the main offices, and IT solutions are delivered through development projects that meet the needs of the user. Most of the IT provision of the organization is managed internally, with ad hoc support from software development companies. For most enterprise systems, there is a history of continuous customizations due to policy changes that require continuous system upgrades.

We recently completed several applications using Google’s suite of data tools, including Google Earth Engine and Google Maps, which allowed us to access an unprecedented volume of geospatial data, computing power through to which we could analyze satellite images in real time. provide usable information. Without cloud services, the solution would have been extremely costly and time-consuming because it required the compilation of terabytes of satellite images and much more computing power than is available in a data center’s geospatial data.

Lessons learned:

New skills are required, including network configuration, security, server and database administration, as well as system operation and integration.

Fast and robust Internet connectivity is critical as availability and performance depend directly.

Transferring large amounts of data to and from the cloud should be considered carefully, for example. massive amount of geospatial or legacy multimedia data.

The discipline of using cloud resources is essential, it uses only what is needed and is disabled when it is done.

A new internal billing / billing process is required.

Employees’ perceptions of privacy and data security must be carefully managed.

Ensure that the appropriate legal aspects have been addressed.

Vendor Lockdown: Once you’ve migrated to the cloud, it can be difficult to switch vendors when highly desirable value-added features are used.

Moving to the cloud is part of the current mandate and future direction. It will be a complete transformation of the current traditional working method. Recently, the organization migrated to Office 365 seamlessly with a transformation requiring minimal training and with benefits that will be obvious to users when they discover the new model in more detail.

Cloud computing can save significant capital expenditures without the need for internal server storage or application development. Failure to have on-site infrastructure removes associated operational costs in the form of energy, cooling and support costs. We will pay for what we use and disengage if necessary because there is no computer capital invested to be feared.

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