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1.10 BROAD APPROACHES TO MIGRATING INTO THE CLOUD

Given that cloud computing is a “techno-business disruptive model” and is on the top of the top 10 strategic technologies to watch for 2010 according to Gartner,7 migrating into the cloud is poised to become a large-scale effort in leveraging the cloud in several enterprises.

 “Cloudonomics” deals with the economic rationale for leveraging the cloud and is central to the success of cloud-based enterprise usage. 

At what IT costs would one want to migrate into the cloud? 

While all capital expenses are eliminated and only operational expenses incurred by leveraging the cloud, does this satisfy all strategic parameters for enterprise IT? 

Does the total cost of ownership (TCO) become significantly less as compared to that incurred when running one’s own private data center? 

Decision-makers, IT managers, and software architects are faced with several dilemmas when planning for new Enterprise IT initiatives.

1.10.1. Why Migrate?

There are economic and business reasons why an enterprise application can be migrated into the cloud, and there are also a number of technological reasons. 

Many of these efforts come up as initiatives in adoption of cloud technologies in the enterprise, resulting in integration of enterprise applications running off the captive data centers with the new ones that have been developed on the cloud. 

Adoption of or integration with cloud computing services is a use case of migration.

At the core, migration of an application into the cloud can happen in one of several ways: Either the application is clean and independent, so it runs as is; or perhaps some degree of code needs to be modified and adapted; or the design (and therefore the code) needs to be first migrated into the cloud computing service environment;  

In brief, migration can happen at one of the five levels of application, code, design, architecture, and usage.

Cloudonomics. Invariably, migrating into the cloud is driven by economic reasons of cost cutting in both the IT capital expenses (Capex) as well as operational expenses (Opex). 

There are both the short-term benefits of opportunistic migration to offset seasonal and highly variable IT loads as well as the long-term benefits to leverage the cloud. For the long-term sustained usage, as of
2009, several impediments and shortcomings of the cloud computing services need to be addressed

Apart from these costs, other factors that play a major role in the cloudonomics of migration are the licensing issues (for perhaps parts of the enterprise application), the SLA compliances, and the pricing of the cloud service offerings.

1.10.2 Deciding on the Cloud Migration

In fact, several proof of concepts and prototypes of the enterprise application are experimented on the cloud to take help in making a sound decision on migrating into the cloud. 

Post migration, the ROI on the migration should be positive for a broad range of pricing variability. 

Arriving at a decision for undertaking migration demands that either the compelling factors be clearly
understood or the pragmatic approach of consulting a group of experts be constituted. 

We use the following technique:
A questionnaire with several classes of key questions that impact the IT due to the migration of the enterprise application is posed to a select audience chosen for their technology and business expertise. 


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