Background
MAT's customers are risk adverse, conservative multinational banks and financial services operators, they value MAT's rapid innovation and reputation for adapting quickly to technological change. ‘Prime Broker', MAT's first product, broke new ground when it was launched, based on open standards and interoperability.
They are facing multiple problems with infrastructure; physically destroyed hardware, critical network failures, malicious bots, mail server problem.
Proposal under consideration is to shift from internal email service to a fully external email service from Google or another 'cloud' provider.
Considerations
1. What is the cost of the damage so far?
2. What are the security issues with external provision?
- Account management
- Access control
- Physical access
- What guarantees does Google give you in regards to security?
- BYOD
3. What are the costs of using an external service compared to internal?
Financial:
-Cheaper - no need to invest in internal servers. (Infrastructures, User, Damages). 99.9% uptime guarantee - may not have that with your own infrastructure. (less risk of losing money down time)
-Ability to expand and contract services.
-Rent over time could be more expensive than internal infrastructure (but maintenance costs would equal this). For a larger company it may be worthwhile to set up their own server.
-What if the cloud provider goes out of service - massive cost
Reputation:
- Companies costumers may not trust them storing their information on the 'cloud'
Learning/knowledge costs
- having the infrastructure internally means having insider knowledge of how the system works.
- Need to have a picture of how your core architecture works regardless of whether using internal/external.
4. What IT services are business critical?
- Communications: email, phone, networks
- Info/Data: databases, files
- Infrastructure: Hardware
5. Who owns/access our data 'in the cloud'?
- Legal, property, jurisdiction
- Depends on laws and regulations of the country the data is stored in? Could be multiple locations.
- Google services give you the option to know and control/manage where your data is replicated.
6. Can we control the supplier of external services?
- Spread the problem - to multiple suppliers
- Contracts
- Visits
- Having a relationship manager for every client that you have
- Maintaining actuary reports
- Hybrid cloud servicing
- Local back up replication
- Change management process
7. What are the long term implications?
- Data retention
- Expanding
- Emerging domain
- Switching costs
- Back up considerations
