How will global market decisions affect the transformation journey?
The cloud opens new opportunities to perform on a global scale. Barriers to global operations are significantly reduced, by empowering companies to deploy assets in their markets, without the need to invest heavily in new datacenters. Unfortunately, this also adds a great deal of complexity from technical and legal perspectives.
Data sovereignty
Many geopolitical regions have data sovereignty regulations. The regulations restrict where data can be stored, what data can leave the country/region of origin, and what data can be collected that's about citizens of that country/region. Before you operate a cloud-based solution in a foreign geography, you should understand how that cloud provider handles data sovereignty.
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The remainder of this article assumes legal counsel has reviewed and approved operations in a foreign geopolitical region.
Business units
It is important to understand which business units operate in foreign locales and which countries/regions are affected. This information will be used to design solutions for hosting, billing, and deployments to the cloud provider.
Employee usage patterns
It is important to understand how global users access applications that are not hosted in the same country/region as the user. Global wide-area networks (WANs) route users based on existing networking agreements. In a traditional on-premises world, some constraints limit WAN design. Those constraints can lead to poor user experiences if not properly understood before cloud adoption.
In a cloud model, commodity internet opens up many new options as well. Communicating the spread of employees across multiple geographies can help the cloud adoption team design WAN solutions that create positive user experiences and potential reduce networking costs.
External user usage patterns
It is equally important to understand the usage patterns of external users, like customers or partners. Much like employee usage patterns, external user usage patterns can negatively affect performance of cloud deployments. When a large or mission-critical user base resides in a foreign country/region, it could be wise to include a global deployment strategy into the overall solution design.
Next steps
Learn about the skills needed during the strategizing phase of your cloud adoption journey.