As well as my blogging and microblogging, Diversity Analysis has a history of writing whitepapers that are intended to be used by customers looking to appraise themselves when making technology decisions. A month or so ago I felt the time was right for a paper that reassessed the technology landscape and gave organizations looking at moving their infrastructure to the clouds a checklist of areas to think about.

Luckily RackSpace saw the value in such a report and supported the writing of the report – as you’ll imagine, a report covering over 20 pages requires a fair amount of research and it’s great when a supporter gives makes life much easier.

Without further ado then, I’m pleased to release my latest report, titled “Moving your Infrastructure to the Cloud, How to Maximize Benefits and Avoid Pitfalls”. I’d encourage readers to download the post. As a taster, the table of contents is appended below;

Executive Summary
Introduction
Definitions
-IaaS
Cost Savings of the Cloud
-Marginal cost – The Economies of Scale
-Burstability – The Utility Model
-From Capex to Opex
-Focusing on Core Business
Realizing the Savings Through Proper Vendor Selection
-Billing capabilities
-Fixed costs
-Minimum charges
Performance and Support
-Performance
–Service Level Agreements
–Transparency in performance
–Persistent vs. Ephemeral Storage, CPU Power and more
-Support
-Service through Standards
–Performance through open standards
–Flexibility through open standards
Security and Compliance
Conclusion

This has been a fun project to work on and, if anything, has raised even more questions and topics for future research. Watch this space!

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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