Dave Van Hoy of Advanced Systems Group Discusses Cloud Power: Decisions, Decisions
As I’m writing this, I’ve just returned from the whirlwind of the NAB Show. “Should I go to the cloud?” was a question often heard echoing throughout the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. I‘d like to press pause on that conversation for just a moment to talk about the many considerations that go into the initial part of that decision. If not carefully thought through, these issues can sabotage efforts during the next phase.
It’s very easy to get to the point where you don’t have the right steering wheel to drive the car you’ve built. Let’s discuss the major decisions that need to be determined before making this determination.
Perhaps the biggest underlying question is: What’s driving you? It’s important not to make a dogmatic decision when it comes to designing a public cloud workflow. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Even if upper management decides they want to move everything to the cloud it doesn’t mean it’s a good decision for your part of operations or your bottom line. The decision points for the IT organization, for example, are very different from a media firm or any company producing and delivering real-time audio and video. Even in terms of storage alone, an IT organization’s general needs are vastly different than a media workstream.
It’s the same type of decision process when you’re using an existing IT infrastructure, be it on-prem or in the cloud, to produce a special project or handle a workflow that it wasn’t designed for initially. The data points other parts of your organization base their cloud decisions on are not going to be the same data points you use.
