The Selection of Cloud Provider Starts with an Exit Strategy
Content
Maybe it sounds like a paradox.
If you are selecting a provider of cloud services, why should you focus on how to leave himm later? The question of exit strategy is also a question of assurance
Exit stratgey is not just some side note you can leave and that’s it. Exit strategy from a cloud environment means that if you ever need to move your infrastructure or data, you don’t end up empty handed.
Especially in this day and age of SaaS services, it could happen that a company is happily using it for regular operations and then the provider decides to change terms and conditions or technical parameters or even cancel the service. Will you be able to migrate the data somewhere else?
In this article we will discuss 4 important reasons why you should have interest in an exit strategy from the very beginning and why it is a key to success.
Business Process Continuity (BPC)
Thanks to technologies, companies are pretty good at keeping their operations up and running continuously. However, technologies could also be the reason why there is an outage.
Let’s look at an example of a manufacturing firm. Cancellation to a contract meant a short period of time that could be used to migrate critical systems several companies were dependent upon.
Such a situation could result in two outcomes:
- If there is an exit strategy – in the allocated time, migration and transfer of the whole architecture and data took place. This should prevent outages.
- If there is no exit strategy – chaos would come because the company would start searching for ways to format and migrate the data, places to migrate it to and what is actually required to do that. The time would probably not be sufficient to make it within the BCP principles.
It is approproate to evaluate how much time you can spend on interrupting operations and even possibly how much data you can sacrifice.
Operational Efficiency
If you are thinking about an exit strategy, you are faced with a decision how to actually plan it. Every company is individual so there is no universal plan of escape. However, there are specific processes and guides that are generally used.
For instance, it is a good idea to consider if you company can withstand the whole migration at once or if you can operate the old and the new systems in parallel. Each approach has its pros and cons and also costs. Thinking through the exit strategy is crucial to making sure everything runs smoothly.
Finances
Additional costs that arise as a result of an insufficient exit strategy can be astronomical. That is not just because you lose your data. You can also lose your whole architecture and the ability to restore it. Why?
We have already mentioned SaaS services but we could also extend the statement to managed services and other systems that are proprietary. In such case you are using services that are non transfarable.
This means that the set up of the service cannot be replicated in any other environment. You are actually faced with a situation where all your work that went into adapting and editing one system cannot be migrated as a perfect copy to a new environment.
Best case scenario – you will have to change the basics of the environment. Worst case scenario – you have to build everything again from the ground up. No matter the situation, you are still faced with costs that could rise to the level of a full investment into new IT architecture.
Accept or Reject
When we buy the majority of things, we don’t think about the contract that is behind each product and that we can accept or reject. None of us would like to read and sign tens of contracts for every item we buy.
But with cloud services that is not the case. There you need to go through the contract very thoroughly and focus on an exit strategy that was signed.
Whether there is no mention about it or the conditions are not favorable to you, it is up to you to accept or reject such a service. And if you decide to sign the contract despite the bad terms, you have to count with the possibility that the exit strategy will become a nightmare.
Even though exit strategy seems more like a technical matter – and the content truly is technical in nature – it hides many non-technical areas like business process continuity, finances and efficiency no matter the circumstances. That is the reason for not viewing it as a secondary issue but one of the most important parts when creating complete IT company architecture.
