The hitchhiker’s micro-guide to the Cloud

What can be outsourced into the Cloud? How long are the lead times? And how do you go about it? There is a lot out there that can give you a breakdown of the what, when, and how; but the experts at Nagarro recommend checking beforehand and performing a proof-of-concept instead of tinkering around with quick solutions.

For starters, a Cloud solution is expected to be more cost efficient. This can be true, however, availability, agility, and fail-safety are becoming priorities as well. In the Cloud, there is no such thing as a clean bill of health. Here, necessity is the mother of all invention.

Scan for services

The most important initial question is, what services do you need for your business and where do the critical points lie? A change in Cloud infrastructures should NOT be calculated based on servers, operating systems, and applications. It is more expedient to screen departments and services and to subsequently assess feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and availability. At Nagarro, in a medium-sized company with 200 to 500 employees, approximately one week is scheduled for this analysis.

We differentiate three areas in IT:

1. Core systems for sales and production
   Nagarro experts recommend as a rule-of-thumb to keep systems that support the core production or critical processes in their on-premise environment. Here, the question of possible latencies is key. If latencies are unacceptable, the verdict is simple: no Cloud suitability.
2. Back-Office, ERP & Co.
   Messaging, CRM, ERP- classic back-office solutions - all standardizable applications are well suited for the Cloud. Best case: Replace it by a SaaS solution. If not, it’s valid to assume if an application can be placed on a virtual machine, it is 95% Cloud-compatible. Exceptions can occur in certain industry solutions, like with ADVOCAT, when the software’s client-server model does not (yet) support communication over the Internet.
3. Websites, eCommerce
   Genuine no-brainers are all systems which are strongly directed and/or which are already operated externally. These services, such as websites, eCommerce, extranets, portals, etc., are gaining popularity due to increased bandwidth, availability, and flexible resources of Cloud providers.