8.1. Recommendations for business professionals
8.1.1. Which applications to move to the cloud
The discussion in the preceding sections makes it clear that there
remain a significant number of challenges that need to be addressed
before cloud computing becomes robust enough for large enterprises.
It is also clear that not all applications are currently ripe for moving to
the cloud. General-purpose applications (like office, email, collaboration
technologies) are prime candidates, since there are rarely any
instances of application requirements in such technologies that are
specific only to an organization. Standalone applications like the
popular CRM Salesforce.com might be easy to deploy on a cloud, but it
is a different proposition altogether to migrate a smorgasbord of
internally developed applications, third-party software and legacy
applications with all their intricate interdependencies to the cloud.
The cloud-based applications will also have to cross the threshold in
terms of security and reliability – either actual or perceived – of their
traditional counterparts.
8.1.2. Who should move to the cloud — the case for the SMEs
As of now, cloud computing makes eminent sense for SMEs;
however, there are significant technical, operational and organizational
issues which need to be tackled before clouds are used
extensively at the enterprise level [50]. Current cloud computing
services are often not cost-effective for larger enterprises, especially
those that have achieved best-of-breed efficiencies from their
computing operations. McKinsey Consulting found that a ‘typical’
data center of a large organization can operate at significantly lower
costs than what would be required to outsource it to a cloud service
like Amazon.com's EC2 (though this price can be significantly lowered
through pre-payment schemes, and with Linux systems). Further,
McKinsey estimates that though the cloud service would lower labor
costs, the extent of decrease (10–15%) is modest. Finally, many
organizations set their service level agreement (SLA) uptimes at
99.99% or higher, which cloud providers currently are not prepared to
match