The difference between cloud deployments that are moderately successful and those that are extremely successful is nothing but integration. The cloud is a holistic platform, and unless every functional area of the organization is covered comprehensively, the real benefits do not surface.
But what are the key parameters when it comes to integration?
Here’s what business need to take care of to ensure proper integration:
- Security considerations: When you move data to the cloud, you need to evaluate what type of architecture it is going to follow in terms of access permissions and storage. This will impact who sees how much, and is a critical factor for medium and large organizations.
- Extent of transferred data: Depending on your business requirements, it may or may not be a good idea to transfer all the data to the cloud. Because your goal is streamlined integration, the data you put in the cloud needs to be sharable across different platforms.
- Network usage: Cloud business models are based on per transaction or access cycle. This necessitates the businesses to estimate the frequency of data usage and work out a possible cost-estimate. So it’s important to assess what kind of data will be usually transferred and how many times.
- Reporting: Some kind of reporting is mandatory for every department in the company. When you move some data to the cloud, make sure it is enough to generate at least the most critical reports you are going to need. At the same time, the system should be able to fulfill logging and other content requirements.
Thinking about these areas deeply before making the migration will help in a smoother transition. It also makes integration better and more useful.
