Are we seeing the renaissance of enterprises in the cloud?

A series of recent surveys on the subject seems to indicate that this is  indeed the case:

Research  conducted by HP

found that the majority of businesses in the EMEA region  are planning to move their mission-critical apps to the cloud. Of the 940  respondents, 80 percent revealed plans to move mission-critical apps at some  point over the next two to five years.

A more recent survey, by research firm  MeriTalk

and sponsored by VMware and EMC (NYSE:EMC

), showed that one-third of respondents say they plan to  move some mission-critical applications to the cloud in the next year. Within  two years, the IT managers said they will move 26 percent of their  mission-critical apps to the cloud, and in five years, they expect 44 percent of  their mission-critical apps to run in the cloud.

The Challenge - How to Bring Hundreds of Enterprise Apps to the  Cloud

The reality is that cloud economics only start making sense when there are  true workloads that utilize the cloud infrastructure.

If the large majority of your apps fall outside of this category, then you’re  not going to benefit much from the cloud. In fact, you’re probably going to lose  money, rather than save money.

The Current Approach

• Focus on building IaaS - Current cloud strategies of many  enterprises has been centered on making the infrastructure cloud ready. This  basically means ensuring that they are able to spawn machines more easily than  they were before. A quick look at many initiatives of this nature shows that  there is still only a small portion of enterprises whose applications run on  such new systems.
• Build a new PaaS - PaaS has been taught as the answer to  run apps on the cloud. The reality however, is that most of the existing PaaS  solutions only cater to new apps and quite often the small, and “non”  mission-critical share of our enterprise applications, which still leaves the  majority of our enterprise workload outside of our cloud infrastructure.
• App Migration as a One Off Project - The other approach for  migrating applications to the cloud has been to select a small group of  applications, and then migrate these one by one to the cloud. Quite often the  thought behind this approach has been that application migration is a one-off  project. The reality is that applications are more of a living organism – things  fail, are moved, or need to be added and removed over time. Therefore it’s not  enough to move apps to the cloud using some sort of virtualization technique,  it’s critical that the way they’re run and maintained will also fit the dynamic  nature of the cloud.

Why is This not Going to Work?

Simple math shows that if you apply this model to the rest of your apps, it’s  probably going to take years of effort to migrate all your apps to the cloud.  The cost of doing so is going to be extremely high, not to mention the time to  market issue which can be even an even greater risk in the end, as it will  reflect on cost of operation, profit margins and even the ability to survive in  this an extremely competitive market, if it is too long.

What's missing?

What we’re missing is a simple and systematic way to brings all these  hundreds and thousands of apps to the cloud.

Moving Enterprise Workloads to the Cloud at a Massive  Scale

Instead of thinking of cloud migration as a one-off thing, we need to think  of cloud  migration on a massive scale.

Thinking in such terms drives a fairly different approach.

In this post, I outlined what i believe should be the main principles for  moving enterprise application at such a scale.

Read  full post: http://www.cloudifysource.org/2012/10/30/moving_enterprise_workloads_to_the_cloud_on_a_massive_scale.html