Business Stakeholders

A stakeholder is an individual or a group interested in decisions or activities of an organization. A list of key stakeholders in a business might end up getting really long. The following illustration lists some stakeholders:

For a detailed insight into this illustration, click the “Hint” button below.

Cloud stakeholders

Next, let’s take a detailed look at the term cloud stakeholders.

Here’s a list of the cloud stakeholders:

1. Cloud service providers: These deliver cloud services to users. Companies purchase cloud services from the cloud service providers per their architecture setup. Cloud service providers can follow IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS models.

2. Customers: A customer is the end user who consumes the services provided by the cloud service providers. With the growing competition, cloud providers have to provide excellent services; otherwise, the consumer can freely move to another one. SLAsService-level agreements play a vital role in this scenario where boundaries and quality of service are also defined.

3. Cloud carrier: It acts as a bridge between the cloud provider and the end user. It provides connectivity and transport of cloud services. The cloud carrier has to work on providing dedicated and encrypted connections to the end user. Once an SLA is set up with the cloud carrier, services are provided on a consistent level.

4. Cloud auditor: It audits the services provided by the cloud providers. It evaluates the service benefits in terms of security and performance provided by the cloud providers. It assesses the security controls in the information system to determine the extent to which the rules are implemented correctly to meet the security necessities of the systems.

A real-life problem

Let’s see a scenario of a company running its workloads on an on-premise server. They have hardware that needs to be upgraded, and it is costing them a lot. They had around three to four clients in the past, but now with the stability in their software, their client count has reached ten.

However, some clients still face latency issues that probably occur because they have an on-premise server. So, distance plays a key factor here. Their current setup can’t keep up with the growth of the business. Even if they purchase new hardware now, it’s possible that in a few years, they’ll have to pay for the hardware again.

After considering these types of problems, the engineering team has come up with a solution: migrating to the cloud. These are the key reasons why they’re opting for the cloud:

• It’s a pay-as-you-go subscription facility in which they have to pay for the services they’re using.

• It has improved the security of resources that follow best practices so that the security of their systems is not compromised. These practices also avoid DDoS attacks.

• It offers flexible solutions because there’s no dependancy on anyone for scaling out for higher consumption tiers.

• It provides the facility of using load balancers, traffic managers, application insights, and so on.

Discussion points

The team has decided to migrate to the cloud, but there are challenges in that as well. The internal team has some discussion points. Let’s see what those are:

• Which model will they use? (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS)
• Which cloud provider will suit them?
• How much effort will be required to migrate to the cloud?
• What technical expertise do they need to achieve that? (The technical expertise is related to the management of the cloud services they’ll be using.)
• How will security issues be managed?
• How will fault tolerance be achieved?

Migration stakeholders

Migrating onto the cloud requires proper research and training. In order to complete these tasks, there are following stakeholders associated with this process:

• IT team: They have to coordinate among themselves and find out the details of the existing resources, how these resources are linked with each other, and check if there are any standalone applications.

  Every company has a different architecture setup as per their needs, and they need to spend a significant amount of time on these needs so that nothing is missed. Here are some of the key tasks for the IT team:

  • Prepare a list of all the servers.

  • Get trained on the Azure Portal to benefit from the facilities it offers

  • Make exception reports for services that are OS-dependent.

  • Think about the possibility of a hybrid configuration because some applications might not be ready for the cloud because cloud service providers might not fully support them.

• Finance department: They’re responsible for cost saving and budgeting. The cost associated with all these migrations must be precise before migrating to the cloud.

• Business heads: They’ll provide details such as:

  • Why do they want to accomplish this task?
  • What’s the vision of the organization?
  • Was moving to the cloud successful for them or not?

Traditional vs. cloud-based processes

Both these processes have their own importance. Here’s a comparison:

Traditional systems

If we talk about traditional systems, enterprises have to host their solutions on on-premise servers. The organization would be responsible for its maintenance. In-house servers allow organizations to have physical control over the system without depending upon third-party providers.

Another option includes depending on the data center providers. These are also a kind of on-premise servers managed by third-party vendors. Disaster recovery is governed by the provider, so organizations don’t need to worry about that.

There are some demerits to traditional systems as well. Let’s see what those are:

In-house servers require a heavy capital investment in hardware and infrastructure. This requires adequate space within an office for a server rack.

The demerits of third-party vendors include the lack of control over our data. Most organizations are concerned about their data security, and using a third party means giving up some level of data control, which could threaten their organization’s privacy. So, it depends upon the individual needs of organizations and if they can tolerate that kind of risk.

Cloud-based processes

Cloud-based services are offered through software and are available remotely. They’re also hosted on the vendor’s server. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have their cloud solutions set up, which they offer to the end users.

Some bottlenecks in cloud-based services for organizations include integrating these new technology trends into their legacy IT systems. Migrating those legacy systems can be challenging and time-consuming. They can also include additional costs that companies might not initially expect. While organizations expect high-cost savings from any cloud provider, some hidden costs can occur during migrations, which they mostly won’t be aware of in advance.

Even if organizations want to migrate to the cloud, they have to think about the security of their personal information being stored on someone else’s server. However, Azure SLAs help tackle such scenarios.

Also, the IT team that works on these upgraded systems has to be well-trained beforehand so they can speed up the migration and know how to use these services once they’re done with the migration.

Note: In a nutshell, proper planning is required before taking these steps because once an organization has migrated its system, it can be challenging to revert this decision if the cloud doesn’t meet its expectations. This can affect business as well. So, it’s important that everything is done in the background and the main running applications aren’t altered.