Targeting The Cloud

It's important to follow a proven, incremental strategy to streamline your move to cloud services. The planning for a transition must focus on three core areas:

Migrating standard software like e-mail, accounting, and CRM to the cloud is typically the first area of focus for a company. There are a growing number of strong SaaS providers in this space who are well capitalized to move on-premise applications to the cloud with little disruption. Migrating custom software applications to the cloud makes good sense but will require more planning and foresight. The typical on-premise custom software application was designed to operate within an existing company's infrastructure according to established security protocols.

Some of these existing custom software applications will migrate easily to the cloud, and some will require an element of upgrading to take advantage of the cloud operating platform. Typical first wave applications for the cloud include external facing apps (e.g., your eCommerce website, partner portal, supply chain management, mobile applications, or social networking applications). We recommend starting your migrations with one smaller, low impact application to learn about the process and follow on with more critical applications as your organization learns about cloud computing.

Building new custom applications on the cloud is another great way to benefit from cloud computing while you learn about how to work with the cloud. The new application process will move swiftly since there will be no delays experienced with hardware, software and infrastructure integration. The capital required for new custom software will be significantly less which should help accelerate the approval process. There will be some in-house applications which a business may choose to keep on-premise. Some of the reasons for not moving custom software to the cloud might be architectural barriers, security barriers, performance barriers, and economic barriers. Older applications might have architectures which just won't easily move to the cloud. We'll help you evaluate the ROI for migrating your applications.