So there in lies the debate, one that’s been floating around conference rooms and the halls of IT for quite a while. Your staff cloud geeks want to build the companies next datacenter in the Cloud, leveraging the Cloud’s latest and greatest APIs to transform your IT Operations into an elastic-computing powerhouse. Imagine all you have to do is interface your existing infrastructure with these interfaces to efficiency. This all sounds great. Right? Well maybe not: API’s are great and all but the migration effort can be costly and complex, sucking up human and financial resources at a rate that can turn any well thought out cloud strategy into a money hemorrhage disaster. Budgets run over and other critical IT projects go by the way side.

Though pressure is mounting on CIOs and CTOs to transition to the cloud as fast as possible without disrupting operations in order to reap the benefits of the cloud which promise to drive incredible value back into the business in the way of energy and physical space consumption savings and pay-as-you-use infrastructure cost models. Adding to the weight is server life expectancy, which typically requires a reinvestment of corporate capital about every 3 to 5 years, to replace old appliances. So the urgency is on, move to the cloud, make IT operations more efficient and minimize capital expenditures. Oh and don’t forget, the migration has to be frictionless, so that you can substantiate the shift in IT strategy, rather than turn it into another large development project that will cost the company more than it stands to benefit in ROI, at least in the midterm.

IT management should be wary of these API intensive projects and consider cloud onboarding solutions that automate the migration of stranded applications from start to finish. Business never stops and operations ‘as usual’ s the expectation. It’s not about the coolest development project. It’s about minimizing costs, retaining investment and choosing the best technology for migrating your servers to multiple clouds without friction. A solution like RiverMeadow enCloud can migrate stranded applications quickly, easily and with minimal cost expenditures, as-is right into just about any cloud stack.