How to Evaluate Moving Legacy Mission-Critical Apps to the Cloud

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

Many enterprises are now planning to move a significant portion of their infrastructure to the cloud, says Dave LeClair, senior director of strategy at Stratus Technologies, a specialist in high availability solutions. A recently released survey conducted by Stratus, North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOM Research found that 75 percent of firms are now reporting the use of some sort of cloud platform, and the worldwide addressable market for cloud computing will reach $158.8 billion by 2013, an increase of 126.5 percent from 2011.

"Enthusiasm for the cloud continues to grow, moving beyond historical concerns such as security," LeClair says. "But, what is also clear from this year’s results is for cloud adoption to continue accelerating beyond its current pace, companies are going to be looking to vendors to enable always-on infrastructures that support their more critical business applications in this new environment…

Companies need to take a hard look at which applications they are putting in the cloud, then, consider what’s involved in managing this shift from a resource, skillset, cost and complexity standpoint, LeClair says. We know first-hand these considerations are not a one-size-fits-all answer and rewriting applications for the cloud will not be the solution in many cases."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itworld.com/networking/366467/how-evaluate-moving-legacy-mission-critical-apps-cloud