Dallas Data Center: Planning Remains Key to Cloud Migrations

With cloud delivery models becoming more pervasive, organizations need to explore their options at in the Dallas data center market.  Fortunately, the greater adoption of cloud strategies has given IT staff and company executives more visibility into the requirements for a successful deployment.  A carefully developed plan can lead to a company leveraging the many benefits a cloud model has to offer.

Crucial Planning Considerations

As with any IT strategy, companies need to understand all the issues involved.  Feeling the pressure to reduce and/or avoid costs, IT managers may focus too much on the benefits of cloud services and not prepare properly for some of the issues that may surface.  The following list represents some concerns to accommodate in the planning process:

• Security has been, and will most likely always be, a major issue.  Regardless of the environment, every infrastructure can become a target of a cyber attack.  Proper controls and policies must be established to keep the cloud environment safe in a Dallas data center.

In addition, these controls and policies extend to how employees use data within the organization.  For example, a major benefit of a cloud model is remote access.  Employees can work from any location at any time by accessing applications and company resources through the cloud.

However, an end user may upload a file containing sensitive company information to a less secure cloud environment.  These types of actions fall under a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) system, which every organization must have in place.

• Although cloud services can provide protection against outages, it isn’t a fail-safe model.  In fact, no service delivery model can guarantee no outage will ever occur.  As a distributed model with built-in redundancies, the cloud maximizes availability.  But, a powerful natural disaster can potentially cause some service interruption in a Dallas data center and the migration plan must provide contingencies for those outages.

Although they didn’t affect data centers in the Dallas area, massive thunderstorms in June 2012 brought down Amazon’s cloud businesses housed in its Virginia data center.  These businesses included popular services such as Instagram, Netflix, Pinterest and others.  And of course, Superstorm Sandy in October 2012 affected several data centers in New York and New Jersey.

• As with any new technology, cloud computing will continue to have a fairly complex learning curve.  As a result, the industry has created new IT positions, such as cloud architects and engineers, to address the need for this expertise.  Cloud models become difficult because they involve multiple technologies.  Therefore, the cloud migration plan must address the expertise required before, during and after deployment in a Dallas data center.

• Once an organization migrates to a cloud environment in a Dallas data center, migrating to another facility can be challenging.  Therefore, it’s important to figure out where the business will be in three to five years.  Then, compare the company’s future plans to those of the Dallas data center to make sure the right synergy exists.

• Compliance becomes an issue for many companies that explore cloud migrations.  If an organization must adhere to regulations such as HIPAA or SOX, they need to be especially careful with their cloud strategies to ensure they remain compliant.  Compliance requires increased security and advanced processes.  Often, organizations consider hybrid cloud models to comply with the necessary regulations.

Cloud services models can provide many benefits to all types of organizations.  However, each company needs to develop a well thought out plan to ensure they consider all the issues that could potentially arise. Then, they need to select a Dallas data center that can provide the best environment for their infrastructure.

CyrusOne developed an enablement platform for cloud services in its Dallas data center.  “Sky for the Cloud™,” provides a home for the cloud in a customized data hall. It’s designed for optimizing Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and enabling fast interconnection to an ecosystem of business partners, content providers, networks, carriers, Internet service providers, and Ethernet buyers and sellers.

Sky for the Cloud encompasses peering within a single location.  This configuration more quickly and affordably pulls content from the edge of the Internet to the heart of the data center. The new platform is expected to provide interconnection of all CyrusOne facilities in Texas—including Dallas, Austin, Houston and San Antonio.