The Decade of the Cloud

Cloud technology has swept the IT world over the past decade. A recent study by Intuit and Emergent Research predicts that over 80% of small businesses will have moved to the Cloud by 2020. An article at searchcloudcomputing.com points out that "migrating to the cloud is often touted as a no-brainer". But looking beyond all the current cloud hype, not all workloads can benefit from the move. The decision to migrate from on-premise servers to the cloud is far from a "no-brainer" as we shall see.

For businesses considering the move, the benefits of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) provided by the cloud could make it quite tempting to use the "rip and replace" method to move all on-premise server applications immediately to the cloud.