What to put into the Cloud – and what not!

There is an endless discussion and debate taking place on what services and applications should typically be moved into into the Cloud – supporting the benefits of Cloud Computing in general, and also what services are less appropriate in the Cloud.

The TM Forum has put together an interesting and simple list of those primary services, that should not come as asurprise for the veteran Cloud Computing user or Service Provider. Still they are important to keep in mind when determining the appropriateness of when to consider migration to the Cloud – and when not:

Promising Cloud services:

• Compute, storage services
• Development and test environments
• Audio, video and web-style collaboration
• Select industry applications (e.g. SalesForce)
• Analytics
• Contact center services
• Data storage and archiving
• Business continuity and disaster recovery
• Desktop virtualization

However, not all is rosy – there are some challenging services and applications that should perhaps be avoided to be migrated to the Cloud, e.g.:

• Sensitive data (e.g. moving offshore)
• Highly customized applications
• Complex transactions
• Applications and data with regulatory restructions
• Legacy batch applications

This is certainly not a complete list of all potential Cloud Computing services and applications, but gives the indication, not surprisingly, that the benefits of Cloud Computing are largely restricted to standardized provisioning of services and applications. In the long run, however, Cloud Computing can also become increasingly applicable to more customizable environments and with more comprehensive international legal frameworks, less sensitive towards data location.