Application Suitability For Cloud

The cloud is the latest fad these days. Everyone wants to be on cloud. It doesn’t matter even if their application doesn’t support cloud.

The most important aspect of moving to cloud is if applications support cloud environment. If the application doesn’t support cloud, then it will end up costing more and performance will de degraded.

Cloud is the right choice for application development and testing. With zero capital cost and low operation cost, cloud can help organizations of any size and type with faster prototyping, development and deployment. Once the product life cycle is complete, organizations can relinquish the cloud infrastructure.

So what type of applications are suitable for cloud. Below is the guidelines for the application that are suitable for cloud:

1. We are seeing an explosion of social media and applications for collaborations. These applications are the right candidate for cloud computing.
2. Disaster Recovery as a Service has been gaining traction among organizations. IT professionals are now considering backing up their data in secured cloud environments.
3. Desktop cloud and productivity applications like calendars, word processors, blogging tools, e-learning, mobile applications and others are better off with the cloud.
4. Mobile applications can utilize cloud environments. Cloud computing can do the heavy lifting in the backend and mobile devices can leverage the elasticity and scalability attributes of cloud.
5. Interaction-intensive Web 2.0 applications, mash-ups and data-intensive applications like analytics, data mining and business intelligence are very cloud enable. Many organizations have already moved CRM, ERP, HR, management tools and business analytics onto cloud and getting good return on investment.
6. Websites for conferences or events promotional and seasonal (websites operational during holiday) websites and also websites that are only operational during a particular time of the day are perfect examples of applications that may run on the cloud
7. Batch applications are clouduitable – suitable for cloud. To make the process faster, even more instances of virtual images can be provisions to perform tasks in parallel. Only cloud can offer this capability of rapid provisioning of IT infrastructure.
8. Multimedia applications are finding a home in cloud environment?”
9. Sometimes organizations experience a drastic change in their IT environments. Merger and acquisition can be one such scenario. During this IT transition public cloud will be very beneficial. When the change subsides, the amalgamated company can decide on a new IT strategy.

Applications not suitable for cloud computing

1. Cloud is not suitable when there is a concern around privacy and sensitive information. In these cases, cloud should not be used in IT infrastructure without legal advice.
2. Although cloud acts like a central monolithic IT powerhouse, servers and storage may be dispersed all around the world. When there is a geopolitical concern, data sovereignty and compliance issue, cloud should not be used. For example, most of the governments will not allow a cloud provider to host citizens’ sensitive health information in a data center outside the country’s boundary.
3. Some applications are tightly bound to a particular type of hardware, chips or drivers. These applications rely on low level specific hardware resources. This category will not work in cloud computing infrastructure.
4. Large enterprise relational database management systems (RDBMS) are not yet ready for cloud environment. There are several factors. Performance is one of them. Loading the database into cloud can be costly and also cause harmonization problem. Latency may impact Quality of Service (QoS).
5. If a company needs detailed control of cloud infrastructure for its application, a public cloud will not be suitable. Private cloud is the right choice.
6. Some applications might have been designed without proper consideration of compatibility. Compatibility and integration is a big issue when planning to migrate an existing application to cloud. This issue might be aggravated in a hybrid cloud scenario. Those applications which can not be easily ported to cloud environment, are not suitable for cloud.
7. Sometimes existing applications can not be moved to cloud. There are no cloud counterparts for these applications either.
8. We all know that cloud is a new IT services delivery model through Internet. Latency and slow Internet speed will be a bottleneck for cloud applications. In absence of high speed broadband, cloud computing can not deliver the services. In this scenario, cloud computing model should not be used

Hanu Cloud Application Assessment let us know whether the application should be made cloud enable. The link is 
http://cloudappassessment.cloudapp.net/