When planning a cloud deployment and management activities, organizations need to address SPIL: security, performance, integration and legal requirements.
Each of these concerns has a significant effect on optimizing
operations to make a cloud work, both operationally and financially
Security
It is critical to figure out what kind of data may be put in the
cloud. Highly sensitive data, such as financial or medical records,
requires planning for an entirely different level of security. Such data
may even need to reside in a particular type of cloud to reduce risk.
If the data is publicly available information for which confidentiality
is irrelevant, security requirements may be minimal, focused on assuring
the integrity and availability of the data.
Performance
An IT department should also consider what kind of applications the
organization may put into the cloud. Is it a database-heavy custom web
application or a standard office productivity suite? There’s a huge
difference in how IT staff would architect these solutions in terms of
ensuring their performance
Integration
If an application cannot be fully virtualized, it’s not a good
candidate for cloud deployment, although this happens rarely. Much more
common is that organizations will deploy different apps in different
clouds, such as software-as-a-service applications that are provided by
different third parties. Planning for integration is critically
important for getting these disparate applications to work together
seamlessly.
Legal
Enterprises need to be cognizant of all the legal requirements that
they and their cloud implementations may be subject to. Whenever
sensitive information is migrated to a third-party cloud solution, there
are inevitably questions about responsibility. If a security breach
occurs, who is responsible for paying for the damage it causes and the recovery actions that are needed?
