My company has made a fundamental shift towards Cloud computing and
specifically towards Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the last 12 months.
Quoting the wiki (it’s always good to start with someone’s quote!):
Cloud computing is the delivery of
computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources,
software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a
utility (like the electricity grid) over a network, typically the Internet.
Why did we do it? At the technical level it was always something that we
wanted to do but like all projects it needs strategic buy-in. The potential
cost savings (as published in the media) as well as the flexible nature of the
cloud meant that it was foolish not to try the cloud if only to compare it with
the environment of ‘traditional’ hosting. At a strategic level, our parent
company had already migrated some of their main-line hosting applications to
the cloud via AWS so there was a path already set out (albeit with differences
in application and customers).
So the process of migrating to the cloud took a number of distinctive
steps.
1. Planning
2. Test Deployment
3. Parallel Running
4. Go Live
5. Update documentation and processes