Free White Paper on Moving Infrastructure to Cloud, Safe and Sound

Diversity Analyst Ben Kepes, has just offered us a good introductory white paper on cloud computing at Rackspace. The paper ‘Moving your Infrastructure to the Cloud: How to Maximize Benefits and Avoid Pitfalls’ can be useful for the early phases of decision making about migrating to the cloud.

As Cloud Computing becomes more popular everyday, companies must learn how to maximize benefits avoiding risks, pitfalls and costly mistakes of cloud migration. Kepes in his paper details potential benefits that a cloud computing strategy can bring to your organization. It also guides IT decision makers through their decision making process, and in particular their assessment of individual cloud computing companies, a critical step towards realizing a successful implementation.

Report Highlights

A few highlights of this paper on cloud computing before I sent you to Hop Over and Get Your Own Copy:

After its introduction and setting of cloud computing definitions*, the paper immediately hones in on cost savings and other financial benefits of IAAS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service):

Scale Economies – IAAS vendors can offer cheaper access to infrastructure by purchasing equipment in bulk.
Pay-as-you-use – With cloud computing, you can pay for what you use, like a utility, instead of investing in a fixed capacity infrastructure that may either exceed or fall short of your organization’s needs.
Cloud services can be paid for out of the operating expenditures budget – Because computing resources are paid for like a utility, they can be paid for out of the operating expenditures budget instead of capital investments.
Realizing the Savings Through Proper Vendor Selection. An organization can realize savings through proper selection of its cloud computing companies. Organizations must select IAAS vendors that allow them to actually take advantage of the benefits, Kepes points out.