Once we know what your IT platforms look like, we’ll look at where they belong. We need to reconsider each application according to costs, burstiness, proximity to end users, security, and many other factors.

There’s a broad range of deployment options available today. Cloud computing isn’t an all-or-nothing decision: rather, many applications will blend on-premise with on-demand services, combining private and public clouds to offer the optimal mix of predictable control and flexible capacity.

Some of the options include:

  • Bare Metal: Traditional “down to the concrete” machines, where you control every aspect of the environment and there’s no overhead for virtualization or management. While this requires up-front investment, it’s the most powerful option for applications with known, relatively consistent resource profiles.
  • Virtual Machines: Virtualization can turn one machine into many—maximizing the use of your existing resources—or many into one. It’s a great option for workloads that play well with others, but still need custom environments and nonstandard configurations.
  • Private Cloud: Virtual machines, self-service, and automation mean you can deliver cloud features atop hardware you own. This is the logical evolution of virtualization, and it’s a strategy many CIOs rely on for flexible IT platforms that keep all data and processing in-house.
  • Virtual Private Cloud: Some cloud providers offer a private cloud service. Running atop pay-as-you-go hardware, the systems are nevertheless disconnected from the public Internet and have only your private IP address space. Some will even guarantee you dedicated hardware for the times you’re using a system.
  • Infrastructure as a Service: The most common form of public cloud, IaaS provides virtual boxes—servers, load balancers, firewalls, and so on—that you use on an hourly basis. Composed designs made up of several machines can be scaled up, scaled down, and copied as needed.
  • Platform as a Service: An emerging contender for building applications quickly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, PaaS eliminates much of the management overhead and lets organizations focus on the product they’re delivering. On the other hand, it has lock-in risks and limits the choice of languages and tools you can use.
  • Mashups, SaaS, and RESTful APIs: The Internet is full of on-demand services that can be woven together to build new solutions. Whether it’s a disaster recovery strategy that relies on when-you-need-them copies of your essential applications, a payment system, or a message queue, there’s a service-based alternative that may be faster, cheaper, or more reliable that what you’re using today.


Once we’ve figured out what goes where, it’s time to migrate your applications.

Step three: migration.