Everyone is talking about moving to the cloud – cost savings, higher reliability, flexible performance options, speedier deployments. But there are still challenges along the way.
How secure is my data?
Many customers are still agonizing over the decision to move to the cloud out of concern for the safety and security of their data. We hear of data breaches and important information escaping and we wonder if our data is safe. The reality is that your data is probably safer in the cloud than on-premise.
Cloud providers take so many steps to secure customer data, creating layers of access so that admins do not see business data, for example. Precautions are taken at many other levels such as background checks, physical access restrictions, and intensive logging of all changes to ensure that data is safe and sound. On premise, the controls can be looser, perhaps developers have enhanced access to troubleshoot issues granted as a favor?
Moving to a new house is never easy
Typically, there are significant data volumes involved, many terabytes of content and even on occasion terabytes of index and meta-data. Moving this volume over an already congested network can be extremely time consuming. Cloud providers have suggestions on how to move large data volumes, e.g. AWS Snowball, but this transfer of data takes time. Business waits for no-one, so once the data is uploaded to the cloud a delta of updates will be run in the on-premise system.
New world, new technology
To gain optimal benefits from the cloud, it is advisable to move your product architecture to a cloud-ready model, leveraging containerized deployment on Docker and Kubernetes, rather than simply moving the on-premise virtual machine environment to a cloud provider. Even experienced architects are having to learn these new skills to stay current.
Staying up to date
Many on premise deployments have lagged behind on important security, technology, and feature innovation in the products, and in third-party products, because of the cost and complexity of upgrade paths. While product teams have taken great pains to improve upgrade paths, and containerization will be a huge boon for patches and other routine maintenance, upgrades may still be a challenge. When moving to the cloud it is a good opportunity to reassess the value of having Managed Services experts managing your product platforms.
How OpenText Professional Services can help
OpenText™ Professional Services are at the cutting edge of deploying products on containerized platforms and have transitioned many customers into both the OpenText Cloud or into third-party cloud environments, using the tools and processes developed over the years. Through partnerships with Google Cloud Platform, AWS and Azure their knowledge and experience can be leveraged. With in-house skills on OpenText products and access to product development teams to help troubleshoot any issues, no one is better placed to aid your transitions to the new world. The OpenText Managed Services team utilize their experience from having over 2,000 managed services customer environments. By using OpenText experts to manage and maintain systems, this can free up customer efforts and resources to achieve improved user experiences, tailor products to achieve improved business benefits, and bring Enterprise Content Services technology to new areas of the business.
All in all, the cloud represents a great opportunity for our customers, but it is not without its challenges – allow OpenText Professional Services to help you take on those challenges to unlock the benefits to your business. Contact us here.
