Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Economic Benefit of the Cloud

An organization typically has many different types of workloads to manage in its data center, and some of these workloads will be a better fit than others for a cloud environment. Therefore, to optimize your economic benefit from the cloud, you must first have a good understanding of your workload requirements.

Commodity workloads, such as everyday e-mail, collaboration, and messaging applications, are straightforward and well-defined business processes executed over and over again. The economic benefit for workloads with these characteristics comes from leveraging cloud capabilities such as standardization, optimization, and scalability. A commodity workload such as an e-mail application is a good fit for the cloud.

A customer-facing financial application in the heavily regulated financial industry is not likely to be a good fit for the cloud because of security concerns. The reason for this is that any potential economic benefit from the cloud is outweighed by security and compliance issues. An organization may have specialized workloads that are used occasionally by a select group of users. These specialized workloads may have run effectively for many years in the internal data center, so there may be no economic benefit in moving them to the cloud.

After you evaluate your mix of workloads, however, you will find many situations where the standardization, flexibility, and scalability of the cloud can deliver outstanding economic benefit.

A move ...