Report

Revealed in the report are many considerations to be cognizant of when looking into cloud-based infrastructure, including security, which the report noted for large enterprises is the most important aspect of information management. The report warns proprietary and sensitive data, if exposed, could have dire consequences to the business, and to sum up most Fortune 1000 companies prefer a private cloud model.

The report as well underlines the importance of understanding the existing IT environment: Enterprises must leverage solutions that can discover the infrastructure in a non-intrusive manner and provide the configuration and interdependency information vital to understanding what business units are utilizing today. The migration will require coordination among operational teams from the server, network, storage, database and application owners. As the existing infrastructure is dynamic and in constant flux, it is important to find a solution that can monitor the changes and drive process encapsulation into automation while cloud migrations.

"Cloud computing is not a temporary phenomenon nevertheless rather one that's here to stay. Its advantages, when deployed correctly, provide a grid-based model that yields great benefits to the business units," said SANpulse CEO Peter Mehta and author of the report. "Key to making on-premise IaaS successful is process encapsulation driven by accurate analytics. It is essential to find solutions that can facilitate capturing the correct information and provide the ability to drive decisions through process automation."