Finding Your Safety Net in the Cloud

We're going to focus on these options now to help support either current or future strategies for incorporating cloud computing into enterprise technology initiatives and investments.

Hybrid on-premises infrastructure incorporating cloud storage for data offloading.
Moving to the cloud may not always be an option due to concerns over compliance with corporate or industry policies. Let's say that you're required to store customer information in on-premises storage and prevent the shipment of this information on hard drives or via file transfer protocol (a.k.a. FTP) to migrate into cloud services. A hybrid setup using the cloud for offloading certain data gives you the best of both worlds—save on storage costs and maintain security and privacy for sensitive data.

Location may be another reason to keep infrastructure and storage on-premises. Since cloud resources are accessed via the Internet, poor bandwidth results in degraded quality of service. Having an on-premises setup gives you the resources necessary to improve productivity. In this case, cloud storage can be used as a more economical storage option for backup and archive data, while data transfer can be planned for non-business hours so as not to impact service.

Hybrid (on-premise and cloud) infrastructure and storage.
While compliance with corporate or industry policies may dictate that sensitive data like customer information must remain on premises, others may not feel secure with corporate data residing outside the enterprise's walls. Since cloud hardware is maintained by hosting providers, non-employee IT administrators possess a high level of access and control over the information. Hybrid setups with both on-premises and cloud infrastructure and storage give organizations a mix of control and flexibility.

• On-premises intranet with cloud-hosted extranet: Maintain control over internal information with a standard on-premises deployment, but provide your customers with the uptime offered by cloud hosting providers without the hassle of hardware maintenance.
• On-premises production deployment with temporary cloud-hosted test and development environments: Spin up on-demand testing and development environments, which eliminates the cost of maintaining up-to-date hardware that collects dust when it's not needed.
• On-premises deployment with cloud-hosted partner portals: Collaborate with partners through cloud portals, paying only for the users involved in the projects without worrying about security risks

All-in cloud deployment.
With everything hosted on the cloud—infrastructure, operating systems and applications—hardware maintenance lies with the hosting provider, allowing organizations to focus IT efforts on improving services. While data is not stored on-site, cloud hosting providers already have high security measures in place to ensure the safety of their customers' data.

It's clear that the future of technology has its head in the clouds—but when it comes to truly incorporating cloud computing into enterprise technology initiatives, many are still relying upon a safety net that uses existing on-premises investments. Your business is unique, and with that comes unique challenges and requirements. Whether you're ready to go all-in or deploy a blended cloud and on-premises model, the cloud is flexible enough to meet your specific needs. The data shows that the same rules apply, whether it's an on-premises investment or otherwise: Find a trusted partner, assess the pros and cons, and make sure your deployment fits your business—not the other way around. 

Perform a Cloud Readiness Assessment

To allow organizations to gain value from cloud computing initiatives while addressing compliance concerns, perform a Cloud Readiness Assessment with AvePoint. Identify sensitive or regulated content and notify key stakeholders, including compliance officers, company executives and administrators of any at-risk content. Once the initial assessment is complete, a best practices approach is outlined to separate regulated and non-regulated content or workloads, and subsequently migrate appropriate content to the cloud.

• Assess existing sites and content: Identify sensitive or regulated content and notify key stakeholders including compliance officers, company executives and administrators of any at-risk content;
• Report on and classify content: Outline a best practices approach to separate regulated and non-regulated content or workloads;
• Design compliant information architecture: Work with stakeholders to outline a desired information architecture for content, permissions, tags and security settings to address compliance and governance standards and requirements; and
• Determine cloud migration approach: Establish a best practices approach to quickly and efficiently migrate appropriate workloads or content to the cloud to lower TCO and begin taking advantage of cloud computing.