Every enterprise today is looking at ways of benefiting from cloud computing. ‘But ideally what applications should be migrated to cloud, and how?’ is the most common question they ask. At INTEROP Mumbai 2011, Shreekanth Joshi, Associate Vice President – Cloud Services, Persistent Systems said that till some time back his organization was exploring the same questions – – What internal applications should be moved to the cloud? What about the ROI?

Persistent Systems realized there was a need to categorize the apps according to their sensitivity / criticality: for eg- mission critical apps involving high risk data or ones requiring rigid compliance requirements could not be moved to public cloud. Also, it was imperative to analyze whether a particular app should be moved to public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud?

The organization followed a systematic approach. Firstly, it identified the deployed applications in the enterprise. It found out that there were 70-80 apps in total and all the apps were contextual. As the IT team was not aware of their existence, Joshi suggested the usage of cloud assessment tools. The tools enable the automatic discovery of applications, databases and workload patterns. These tools also facilitate decision making regarding which cloud (private/public/hybrid) is suitable for a particular application. The organization then analyzed from the business point of view which applications are mission critical and categorized them in different tiers with respect to criticality of information.

After the cycles of analysis, Persistent Systems decided to keep the mission critical apps in their own environment, that is within the private cloud. Since SaaS applications were revenue generating for them, they decided to migrate it to a hosted environment.