Migrating to the cloud? Here’s how to do it right

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Neil Cavanaugh.

Is moving to the cloud as simple as they say? Probably not. Organizations that host large, integrated systems in their own data centres will no doubt be approached by their application vendors for migration to the silver lining of the cloud. I was recently involved with appraising the feasibility of moving one of the largest Oracle eBusiness suite installations in the UK to “on-demand.” This experience gave me some insights into the complexities behind such a move.

Existing investment
In order to run very large applications with thousands of users, a substantial investment would have been made in existing infrastructure. This includes resilient server infrastructure, disk space, and software licenses.
You’ll need to spend some time considering what happens to this equipment if you migrate an application into the cloud, particularly as there may be other applications sharing processing power, shared disk resources and expensive database licenses…

If you move one of your applications away, you may have to migrate some or all of your existing licenses across to your provider, which could mean paying twice if there are multiple applications from different vendors hosted on the same platform.

Ancillary applications
Most big systems don’t work alone; you may have ancillary applications from different vendors for the purposes of enhanced reporting and data import…

Read more from the source @ http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/15/migrating-to-the-cloud-heres-how-to-do-it-right/