Cloud Migration: A Case Study of Migrating an Enterprise IT System to IaaS

摘要

This case study illustrates the potential benefits and risks associated withthe migration of an IT system in the oil & gas industry from an in-house datacenter to Amazon EC2 from a broad variety of stakeholder perspectives acrossthe enterprise, thus transcending the typical, yet narrow, financial andtechnical analysis offered by providers. Our results show that the systeminfrastructure in the case study would have cost 37% less over 5 years on EC2,and using cloud computing could have potentially eliminated 21% of the supportcalls for this system. These findings seem significant enough to call for amigration of the system to the cloud but our stakeholder impact analysisrevealed that there are significant risks associated with this. Whilst thebenefits of using the cloud are attractive, we argue that it is important thatenterprise decision-makers consider the overall organizational implications ofthe changes brought about with cloud computing to avoid implementing localoptimizations at the cost of organization-wide performance.