Migration to the cloud. Simple steps to improve business performance



    The difficult economic environment continues to put pressure on Russian business and the IT industry is no exception. Many companies are trying to save on infrastructure or at least “stretch” costs. In this, hosting providers came to the rescue, offering data and workspace for employees in the cloud.

    The service is gaining popularity especially among foreign companies operating in Russia due to the tightening of legislation in the field of working with information. One way or another, each company must take into account the requirements of Federal Law No. 152 “On Personal Data” when working with contractors and partners.

    What this law carries for the company:
    • The obligation to consent to the processing, storage and, if necessary, the transfer of data for processing by third parties,
    • The obligation to collect only the data that is really necessary for working with the client,
    • The obligation to delete customer data upon request,
    • The obligation to protect customer data from theft, hacking, transfer to persons who do not have the right to access the data, in particular, advertising agencies.

    This is just a small list of responsibilities. Depending on the type of data, requirements may vary. For example, to work with confidential information, you will need a license from the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEC), and with a state secret - the FSB. Naturally, the requirements for the data holder there are completely different.

    A very important point is the cross-border data transfer, which dramatically complicates the process of transferring personal data abroad.

    In general, this law, adopted in 2006, which has undergone significant changes in recent years, is designed to increase the level of security of the individual citizen and the state as a whole. In addition, the state planned using this law to stimulate the development of the domestic IT market.

    And the state monitors the implementation of the Law. Roskomnadzor regularly carries out checks not only in large banks and companies, but also in ordinary online stores.

    Naturally, the presence of such regulation creates certain difficulties in the work of companies.

    Let's take a look at foreign business in our country.
    In order for the work of foreign firms to fully comply with the letter of the law, companies must not only transfer the data themselves to the territory of the Russian Federation. Everyone understands that the infrastructure for data storage is worth a huge capital investment and service system. All this requires quite high qualifications from employees. At the same time, the economic benefit from the point of view of business here, to put it mildly, is doubtful. And if you recall that the amount of information, in particular, to be stored, is constantly growing, if only thanks to the recently adopted package of laws of the Spring, then there is another headache - scaling the infrastructure.
    Therefore, many go to the clouds.

    Hosting providersAt the moment, they offer almost the entire range of necessary services - from the usual backup and storage of data to the organization of teamwork of geographically distributed employees and generally providing companies with the necessary computing power without the need to purchase powerful equipment in their property and spend money on its maintenance.

    A separate article is software license rental. Renting software becomes much more profitable than buying the entire software package for each individual machine.

    The fact that the transfer of costs from capital to operating creates savings in taxes should also not be forgotten.
    Market conditions, which include the depreciation of the ruble, rising prices for equipment, falling labor costs and increased competition among hosting providers, makes the transfer of its IT infrastructure to the cloud economically more than justified.

    For example, if you have 10 servers in your company, the average price is 1 000 000 rubles, you need to attach to it:
    • uninterruptible power supply, communications and cooling. The rack consumes about 25 kW per hour, taking into account cooling, 1 kW per hour costs about 5 rubles. It runs into 90,000 rubles a month.
    • A gigabit communication channel adds another 30,000 rubles a month.
    • Plus, at least two specialists who are ready to monitor equipment around the clock - at least another 150,000 rubles per month, including taxes.

    In total, you initially need 10,000,000 capital investments, plus at least 270,000 rubles a month, not counting the costs of replacing a failed equipment.

    In the case of renting similar capacities from a vps provider, it will cost about 600-700 thousand rubles a month, without the need to provide its own infrastructure and support team.

    As you can see, the economy is simple - in a year you will spend 8,400,000 rubles on the cloud, and in the same period of owning your infrastructure you will spend 13,240,000. The costs for both directions will be equal in two years, when you spend 16,480,000 on your infrastructure. and on the cloud 16.8 million.

    But at the same time, you will not think that you need to monitor the equipment and contain a team. Moreover, most providers with this order volume will give an additional discount. Do not forget about the fact that you can always easily change the scale of your infrastructure both down and up with a simple request to the provider, and how to provide it is already his problem. At the same time, you pay only for what you really need, and there can be even more savings on this.

    Fortunately, the choice of hosters is large and you can choose any virtualization environment, as well as any OS and a set of related services. True, now you can completely organize a business on the network.

    Thus, for both Russian and foreign companies, virtual infrastructure has become a reliable and understandable solution.

    Naturally, foreign business expects the 152nd Federal Law to be executed from the cloud provider. That is, the hoster must at least have a license from Roskomnadzor and have all its facilities in Russia, and if it is supposed to work with specific information, there must also be a license from the FSTEC and / or FSB, as we said above.

    With the legal and organizational side, everything is more or less clear, especially since we already have many articles on this topic.
    Let's look at the technical aspect of the transition from our own infrastructure to the cloud. Immediately discard simple examples where a company needs, say, just set up a backup.

    Let your company provide services to the public, for example, a bank. How to transfer the entire infrastructure of the bank to the cloud?

    Let's move in stages:
    1. Assessment of the stored information from the point of view of the possibility of storage and processing by a third party (most likely, the bank will retain something and give something back)
    2. Evaluation of the current resource base of the bank in relation to the actual requirements for data storage (most likely somewhere you can optimize the capacity of the servers that are used for storing and working with data)
    3. Evaluation of the software component when working with data (what software is needed to work - from the operating system to the database version and web service)
    4. Preparation of a plan for a phased transition of services from your own infrastructure to the cloud with full duplication at the transition stage.
    5. Testing for fault tolerance and correct operation after each stage of the transition plan is completed.

    When migrating to a vps server , most likely, each hosting provider will be able to help you at every stage, because it is in his interests - on the one hand, he needs a client, on the other - the migration should go smoothly and ensure high-quality work throughout the service interval , because hosting owners also want to sleep peacefully.
    Let us briefly go through the stages.

    1. Evaluation of stored information in terms of the possibility of storage and processing by its third party


    First of all, it is necessary to divide the information into:
    • Publicly available
    • Service,
    • Confidential
    • Special (state secret, for example).

    The information will need to be physically separated (to eliminate possible dismounting in the database) in order to isolate the part that will be transferred to the hosting provider, and which part will remain in the company.

    The same will need to be done by the company's services (both internal and external). For example, a website, an Internet bank can be transferred to a third party, but a system that works with confidential information can already be transferred only if the operator has a FSTEC license.

    2. Assessment of the current resource base of the bank in relation to the actual requirements for data storage


    It's no secret that in the pre-crisis time, companies could buy fairly powerful servers and computers. As a rule, these computing powers are used very inefficiently. For example, in many cases, you can save on processor power. Often reduce the hard drive with a communication channel.
    Accordingly, it is necessary to summarize the system requirements for your software, collect statistics on actual use and select the necessary infrastructure from the host. This will definitely give you big savings already at the start of work.

    3. Evaluation of the software component when working with data


    Here you, together with the hosting provider, make a list of the software that he will be able to rent for you (for example, the same MS Office, SQL), and what you will need to purchase separately.

    Leasing, as a rule, will come out much cheaper than buying a licensed copy of any software for a separate machine, because you will see another savings here.

    4. Preparation of a plan for a phased transition of services from your own infrastructure to the cloud with full duplication at the transition stage


    To break, as they say, not to build. And you don’t need to break anything, until the new infrastructure is tested and debugged.

    Have a phased plan for moving your infrastructure to the cloud. You should always start small, send one of your company's web services or some internal resource to the cloud. Check how everything works, whether clients noticed a transition or everything went “seamlessly", take into account the problems encountered and proceed to the next service. Gradually, you will translate everything that was necessary with minimal technical difficulties.

    5. Testing for fault tolerance and correct operation after completion of each stage of the transition plan


    Be sure to check the health of the entire infrastructure after migration. Only after that you can completely abandon your infrastructure.

    More detailed technical aspects of migration are not the subject of this article, especially since this is all individual for each company. Nevertheless, following the indicated general plan will allow you to migrate as quickly as possible and at the same time with a minimum set of technical plan questions.

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