Cloud Computing in the Construction Industry
By Caleb Burton
Overview
- Reasons for Construction Companies Moving to the Cloud
- Cloud Computing Economics
Questions?
What is Cloud Computing?
Moving to the Cloud
- Carefully consider what you intend to move to the cloud to avoid subpar performance
- Questions to ask yourself:
- What your organization will move?
- Why it will move it?
- What the ramification of that move will be?
- Scope the resources needed for your deployment thoroughly
- Use capacity planning tools
- Purchase enough resources to cover a full year of server/data
- Determine what the costs are to add resources later
Reasons for Construction Companies Moving to the Cloud
- Be prepared for the cultural shifts that accompany moving to the cloud
- Ideal for those organizations looking to compete, but who have limited in-house technical resources
- Ability to work from any location
- Some cultural changes that cloud can bring about include:
- Better communications between engineering and operations (DevOps)
- Greater emphasis on sharing and collaboration
- Reduction in redundancy
- Greater focus on continuity of business in face of disaster
- Greater operational efficiency
- Less reliance on internal IT
- More agility
- Keeping IT staff (or lack thereof) trained and up to date with the latest software
- New services can be rolled out quickly, even to remote construction sites, with little to no internal resource used for deployment
- Migrate to the cloud as you would to a larger on-premises server
- Opex not capex, reduced upfront investment, reducing risk at a difficult time in the construction industry
- No on-going server maintenance/management
- For the most part, the same underlying deployment and migration processes should be employed
- The cloud doesn’t make this initial migration any easier or harder than other types of migrations
- Scale up (or down) the numbers of users or types of apps whenever you need
- Don’t need to worry about capacity planning
- Purchase high-quality monitoring software for your virtual environment
Cloud Computing Economics
- Virtual/cloud environments have monitoring needs that differ greatly from traditional deployments.
- A good monitoring system will alert you to issues before they become problems and allow you to focus on your core business and not reacting to IT issues.
- Do your homework and know what you’re currently spending
- All things that must be identified prior to undertaking an ROI (return on investment)
- Define your business needs before evaluating pricing models
- Examples:
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud would be focused on resource availability
- Hosting clouds would emphasize scalability
- Storage clouds would rely on fast hardware and data capacity
- Understand the difference between CAPEX and OPEX
- Capital Expenditures (CAPEX)
- Operating Expenses (OPEX)
- Apply cost benefit analysis, impact assessment, and due diligence to your cloud initiative