All clouds are not equal: differentiating an enterprise cloud

1. Summary

Until recently startups and small to medium businesses drove cloud adoption. Now, with cloud service providers maturing, many businesses are considering migrating applications to the cloud. In particular, the IT industry has witnessed a rapid adoption of the public cloud. This research report examines the current state of the cloud, barriers to enterprise cloud adoption, and the key factors to consider when choosing an enterprise cloud platform.

Since the majority of cloud-based applications and workloads require elasticity, the major public cloud adoption trend is toward hosting scale-out applications like a public-facing web application or a mobile backend that exposes API. Enterprise customers usually begin evaluating the cloud by moving development and test environments. They have yet to broadly migrate mission-critical applications like ERP, CRM, messaging, collaboration, business intelligence, and other line-of-business applications.

Many factors influence the decision to migrate enterprise applications to the cloud. Many applications must remain in the data center while other applications move to the cloud. This division requires a robust hybrid platform that can seamlessly bridge the cloud and on-premise assets. Reliability, security, availability, compliance, and governance all play a major role in the decision.

Cloud providers must supply their customers with an enterprise-ready platform. Enterprise applications need an environment that is reliable and robust. It should deliver predictable performance. Not every cloud platform is enterprise-ready.

Key findings in this report:

• The ROI of cloud migration varies by workload, those with potential gain being most ready. Enterprises can start cloud migration with these cloud-ready workloads and then move mission-critical applications.
• The cloud addresses discrepancies between dev/test and production by automating the provisioning environment that closely resembles the production environment.
• Despite understanding the benefits of the cloud, CIOs will not move their core business applications into the cloud until cloud providers address several main concerns, including security, control, customization, and complexity.

• Enterprises prefer integrated, managed cloud service offerings that provide high availability, security, compliance, and assured business continuity.