Cloud Migrations: Don’t Forget About The Data

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Michael C. Daconta.

Gartner research director Richard Watson once observed, "When the CIO issues the simple directive: ‘Move some applications to the cloud,’ architects face bewildering choices about how to do this, and their decision must consider an organization’s requirements, evaluation criteria and architecture principles."

Unfortunately, many architects assume that migrating your legacy systems means migrating your applications to the cloud. However, the reality is that such a migration involves both data migration and application migration. Each of these must be assessed, planned, designed and executed separately and then integrated. They are two parts of the same migration of a legacy system, but each requires different analysis steps and different skill sets…

By focusing on your data migration separately from your application migration, you will ensure that both will scale properly. It’s worth noting that government agencies are taking the lead in this area. For example, the Department of Defense Cloud Computing Strategy calls for both metadata tagging and a data cloud that will implement "data-as-a-service" (DaaS). The creation of that requires separating the application from its data during the migration phase. This is the same strategy that the Intelligence Community is pursuing with its community cloud…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/government/cloud-saas/cloud-migrations-dont-forget-about-the-d/240163562