Migration to the cloud. Simple steps to improve business performance

Difficult economic conditions continue 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 placement for employees in the cloud.

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

What this law carries for the company:

• Obligation to accept consent to the processing, storage and, if necessary, transfer of data for processing by third parties,
• The duty to collect only the data that is really necessary to work with the client,
• Obligation to delete customer data upon request,
• The duty to protect customer data from theft, hacking, transfer to persons who do not have the right to access data, in particular, advertising agencies.

This is just a short list of responsibilities. Depending on the type of data, requirements may vary. For example, to work with confidential information, a license will be required from the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEC), and with a state secret - the FSB. Naturally, the requirements for the data holder are completely different there.
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A point on cross-border data transfer is very important, which dramatically complicates the process of transferring personal data abroad.

In general, this law, adopted in 2006, which has undergone significant changes over the past year, is intended to raise the level of security of the individual citizen and the state as a whole. In addition, the state planned with the help of this law to stimulate the development of the domestic IT market.

And the state monitors the execution of the law. Roskomnadzor regularly performs 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. It is clear to all that the infrastructure for data storage costs huge capital investments and service systems. All this requires a fairly high qualification from the staff. At the same time, the economic benefits from the point of view of business here, to put it mildly, are doubtful. And if we recall the fact that the amount of information, in particular, to be stored, is constantly growing, even if thanks to the recently adopted package of laws "Spring", then another headache arises - infrastructure scaling.
That's why many go to the clouds.

Hosting providers currently offer almost the whole range of services needed - from the usual backup and data storage to the organization of team work of geographically distributed employees and, in general, providing companies with the necessary computing power without having to buy powerful equipment in the property and spend on its maintenance.

A separate article is the rental of software licenses. 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 costs creates savings in taxes is also not worth forgetting.
The market situation, which includes the depreciation of the ruble, rising equipment prices, falling labor costs and increasing 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:

• ensuring uninterrupted power, communication and cooling. The rack consumes about 25 KW per hour with cooling, 1 KW per hour costs about 5 rubles. In the month runs up to 90 000 rubles.
• Gigabit communication channel adds another 30 000 rubles per month.
• Plus at least two specialists who are ready to monitor equipment around the clock - at least another 150,000 rubles a month, including taxes.

In total, you initially need capital investments of 10,000,000, plus a monthly minimum of 270,000 rubles, not counting the cost of replacing the failing equipment.

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

As you can see, the economy is simple - for the year you spend 8,400,000 rubles on a cloud, and for the same period of ownership of your infrastructure you spend 13,240,000. The costs for both directions will become 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 about the fact that you need to monitor the equipment and contain a team. Moreover, most providers with this amount of order will give an additional discount. Do not forget that you can always easily change the scale of your infrastructure in a smaller and larger way with a simple request to the provider, and how to ensure this is his problem. At the same time, you only pay for what you really need and this can save even more.

The benefit is now the choice of hosters is large and you can choose any kind of virtualization environment, and any operating system and a set of related services. Indeed, now you can fully organize your online business.

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

Naturally, a foreign business is waiting for the fulfillment of the 152nd FL from the cloud provider. That is, the hoster should at least have a license from Roskomnadzor and have all its facilities in Russia, and if it is intended to work with specific information, there must also be a FSTEC and / or FSB license, as we said above.

The legal and organizational side is more or less clear, especially since we already have quite a few 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 companies need, 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. Evaluation of the stored information from the point of view of the possibility of storing and processing it by a third party (most likely, the bank will retain something, and give something away)
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 servers that are used for storage and work with data)
3. Evaluation of the software component when working with data (what software is needed for work - from the operating system to the version of the database and web service)
4. Preparation of a plan for the phased transition of services from its own infrastructure to cloud with full duplication during the transition phase.
5. Testing for fault tolerance and correctness of work after the implementation of each stage of the transition plan.

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 interest - on the one hand he needs a client, on the other - the migration must go without failures and ensure quality work throughout the service interval , because the owners of the hosting, too, want to sleep.
Let's take a quick look at the content of the stages.

1. Evaluation of stored information in terms of the ability to store and process it by a third party

First of all, it is necessary to divide the information into:

• Publicly available
• Service,
• Confidential,
• Special (state secret, for example).

Information will need to be physically divided (to eliminate possible dismounting in the database) in order to be able to select 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 web site, Internet bank can be transferred to a third party, but a system that works with confidential information can only be transferred with an FSTEC license from the operator.

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

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

3. Evaluation of the software component when working with data

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

Rent, as a rule, will be much cheaper than buying a licensed copy of any software on a separate machine, because the next savings you will see here.

4. Preparation of a plan for the phased transition of services from its own infrastructure to cloud infrastructure with full duplication during the transition phase

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

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

5. Testing for fault tolerance and correctness of work after the implementation of each stage of the transition plan

Be sure to check the performance of the entire infrastructure as a whole after migration. Only then can you completely abandon your infrastructure.

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