By John Hawkins

Financially, cloud models demonstrate that cloud is a good bet for businesses. Cloud is not only a good decision based on the financial benefits but, for IT departments inside the organization, it is also a way to get out of the low-value IT tasks - giving IT the ability to focus on more strategic initiatives.

In many cases, for a lot of organizations, there is a difference between the financial models projected savings and the savings realized when they go to cloud.

The cloud provider’s perspective is that they are open for business for net new servers. Customers, so inclined, can swipe a credit card and develop new workloads in cloud. However, many organizations don't just want net new servers, they are looking for a ways to take existing workloads and move them to cloud.

Many businesses did their homework and calculated the value of cloud, which typically isn’t hard to do especially with a high ROI and ability to show a fair amount of CapEx and OpEx savings. Armed with a solid business case - the migration to cloud seems rudimentary.

The reality is that the forecasted savings and the actual realized savings of moving to cloud are not aligned; the impact is that organizations are stalling on their cloud efforts.

There are many reasons for this such as:



-Costs associated with manual migrations

-Specialized knowledge to migrate applications to cloud

-Application assessments may show the need to re-write applications

-Domain knowledge of the various cloud providers and how to reconfigure workloads once in cloud

As a result many cloud providers are unable to lure business from the current state of physical and virtual workloads to a cloud platform. The net impact to cloud providers is excess capacity and underutilized cloud infrastructures.

Imagine a capability where you could teleport your servers to cloud, and provide the ability to move servers between clouds once they are there. Teleportation may be a ways off but there is a solution.

The solution is cloud workload mobility. Cloud mobility gives workloads the ability to lift workloads from a current state environment and place them in cloud. This gives cloud providers a tool to help fill their public clouds with brownfield workloads, and gives the business the flexibility to migrate workloads from physical and virtual to cloud.


John M. Hawkins is a Senior Director of Consulting Services at RiverMeadow Software.