In the facilitation of migration efforts with respect to CRM/ERP platforms like Siebel, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce and Workday…there is a seemingly strong underlying relationship between what is perceived as a the performance of the cloud "system" and the risk reduction designs within software development to get that migration to “work”.
Currently, more and more legacy applications are being situated in a private/hybrid cloud environment. Typically requiring custom integration and development efforts. When measuring current private/hybrid environment, an approach similar to standard CRM/ERP migration is typically established. This is done by creating a QoS baseline and data ETL, then ensuring that any custom functionality is preserved. Interestingly, this approach can not only be used for application migration but in can help in determining disaster recovery and architecture costs when utilizing cloud resources.
Proactive feels there is a close knit relationship between CRM/ERP migration efforts and risk management. By leveraging the extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) connectors and high performance cloud measurement tools/analytics, there can be methods and processes at the ready to reduce the risk of blind faith migrations of strategic applications away from a local datacenter. Establishing a Quality of Service (QoS) baseline for performance in the cloud can be taken well beyond the simple measurement of uptime defined in most service level agreements. Disaster recovery (DR), cost optimization, and enhance end user experience performance can be new metrics tied to SLAs.
So...in the end, is simply saying “the server is up” a reasonable key metric in an SLA. Businesses must perceive their migration enhanced their operations. Bad connections, intermittent behavior, or out-and-out lost service issues will be issues of focus going forward. Is it possible that cloud service provider SLAs of the future include the perceived user experience, impacted operational costs, and disaster recovery? It’s just a matter of time…
