Analysis of on-premise to cloud computing migration strategies for enterprises

Abstract

In recent years offering and maturity in Cloud Computing space has gained significant momentum. CIOs are looking at Cloud seriously because of bottom line savings and scalability advantages. According to Gartner's survey in early 2010 of 1600 CIOs around the world, Cloud computing and virtualization were on top of their list. This interest has also resulted in slew of products and services from existing IT players as well as new comers which promise to offer many solutions to pave the path towards Cloud computing adoption by enterprises. As organizations get on to the Cloud computing bandwagon they are looking at their current IT setup and looking at the best way they can take advantage of what Cloud has to offer. For a given enterprises, getting on to Cloud might be a complete new start from scratch, a limited deployment of new applications or migration of part of existing applications integrating backwards with on-premise applications. To take advantage of the Cloud, enterprise will need to define their short and long term Cloud strategy. They will need to consider factors specific to their businesses and determine their requirements, risks and benefits. Proper investigation by the enterprise will give them insight in to the benefits and specific strategy they need to follow to gain the said benefits from Cloud. This Thesis analyzes specific strategies which enterprises can adopt, both from business and technology perspective to make sure the migration and integration between on-premise and Cloud happens with minimal disruption to business and results in maximum sustainable cost benefit. It presents the current state of On-Premise IT and Cloud Computing space and then compares them to come up with enterprise specific variables based on which one can make Cloud migration decisions. Finally, Thesis presents the broad frameworks for "migration to Cloud" and confirms the same by interviewing enterprise managers involved in Cloud migration. There are various ways to slice and approach the Cloud migration - but all should take in to consideration the business processes, architecture of existing systems, architecture of available Cloud services, interoperability between on-premise and Cloud applications, maturity of Cloud and standards, short and long term cost savings, sustainability, data/security/regulation, user adoption, available Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and business criticality.