InsightaaS: Several of the best practices documents developed by the Toronto Cloud Business Coalition, including those dedicated to planning for the cloud/cloud strategy and cloud GRC, mention the importance of building exit strategies: of defining what will happen in the event that a customer wants to leave a supplier, or if a supplier discontinues its service. In fact, the report on Planning for the Cloud/Cloud Strategy: Enterprise contains an entire section on exit strategies. This section includes a passage stating:
Good exit strategies must be grounded in a good backup plan, where either the application or physical environment is in place to roll back cloud services to in-house resources or another provider environment. As the source of migration, the internal user organization may be challenged to establish appropriate staging, testing and migration processes; however, as each component of the application is built, the user should consider if it is possible to roll back the application and data from a specific cloud environment, and how this might be accomplished.
– Planning for the Cloud/Cloud Strategy: Enterprise, Toronto Cloud Business Coalition, December 2015
Despite the importance of incorporating exit strategies in cloud plans and cloud GRC policies, many organizations fail to take the end-game into account when building their approaches to the cloud. Verizon customers who failed to consider how to migrate from the service are now particularly sorry that they skipped this step, as Verizon has announced that it is shuttering its public cloud service and giving current customers (according to a new item from Data Center Knowledge) just two months “to move their data or lose it forever.”
As a group, cloud providers offer access to incredible technology providing inexpensive storage, scalable processing, redundancy, and managed security at compelling price points. However, businesses don’t work with cloud providers as a group – they deal with individual suppliers. The Verizon story provides a cautionary tale underscoring the importance of considering the entire scenario before committing resources to a specific platform.
Verizon Communications, which several years ago had huge public cloud ambitions, is shutting down its public cloud service, which competes head to head with giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
The company notified its cloud customers of the coming change Thursday, giving them two months to move their data or lose it forever. It has already removed any mention of public cloud compute services from its website.
The move appears to be a confirmation of what many in the industry have been predicting, especially since news started coming out of big telcos looking to offload massive data center portfolios they had amassed in recent years to go after the cloud services market. It has become almost impossible to compete with AWS, Azure, and to a lesser extent with Google Cloud Platform in the market for renting virtual compute power over the internet and charging by the hour….
Read the entire post on the Data Center Knowledge site: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/02/12/verizon-shutting-down-public-cloud-gives-users-one-month-to-move-data/
