| | March 20158CIOReviewopinionin myThere's no shortage of consultants and advisers to help you plan and execute a move of your IT infrastructure to the cloud. If you're facing a tight deadline to vacate a data center or another pressing business imperative or you just want to take advantage of lower cost/pay-as-you go, innovative managed services, bringing in the consultants and their methodologies to drive the process might be a sound approach.But crafting and executing your own cloud infrastructure strategy -- really customizing it to support your unique business -- has a certain appeal: It forces a spring cleaning -- a methodical application-by-application architectural review. It focuses on the cost of supporting each application, making sometimes-difficult conversations with business owners about legacy retirements a little bit easier. It gives ownership of the cloud strategy to the architects, developers and engineers who will implement it. It highlights gaps in IT staff cloud knowledge, with enough time to plug them with training or new staff. It drives a discipline around infrastructure decisions and their impact on budget and business strategy. Deciding whether to move an application to the cloud or house it on premise or in a third-party data center makes you think very hard about risk and what's important to your business. AP isn't new to the cloud. We have a relatively long history with cloud services, dating to 2004 and our first contract with a content distribution network to boost performance of a key web portal before the General Election -- long before "cloud" terminology was common. Usage of the public cloud has grown for us since then, for compute and storage. In a significant move, transcoding, storage and web delivery of AP's vast breaking news and archival video as well as search functionality for a key content-delivery portal were transitioned to the public cloud over the past year, with great success. The video project went from concept to production in six months, and cloud transcoding cut video order processing in half -- from 60 minutes to fewer than 30. It was a win for us and a win for our video customers. But is cloud technology right for AP's other Drifting into the Cloud PlatformBy Lorraine Cichowski, SVP & CIO, Associated PressLorraine Cichowski
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