Best Practices: Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS)

It seems as if every CIO comes back from a conference cocktail party demanding IT "move to the cloud." While this can mean many things, including using software-as-a-service, managed hosting, or application service providers, the demand often centers on moving applications out of your own budget-sucking data center and up to an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform. Can you leverage IaaS cloud? While the answer is certainly "yes" in many cases, the real question is how should you do it and when. Forrester interviewed more than 60 organizations that are leveraging IaaS clouds. They have found that it's best to leverage cloud platforms as temporary capacity, because the teaser rates of $0.10 per CPU per hour may look enticing but can add up fast. The best places to start are with test and development of new applications, Web applications, and high-performance computing. We advise clients to get their feet wet with these application classes first but plan to move on to more advanced uses, such as cloud bursting and leveraging cloud-resident services and management tools, and then progress to cloud-native services such as Hadoop and Microsoft SQL Azure.