Put your 'crapplications' into the cloud, experts suggest

At Cloud Leadership Forum, speakers debate which apps are suited for the cloud

Which applications should run in the cloud? It's a question asked by many customers today as they decide which workloads to keep in house and which to offload to a third-party service provider. One approach is to start with the apps that give IT headaches.

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"Some of you may have thousands of them that have been around 10-plus years, and you can never kill them. Some people call them 'crapplications.' Why waste your own infrastructure and IT staff to support these things?"

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Which applications should run in the cloud? It's a question asked by many customers today as they decide which workloads to keep in house and which to offload to a third-party service provider. One approach is to start with the apps that give IT headaches.

Tech Debate: Cloud: Public or private?|
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"Some of you may have thousands of them that have been around 10-plus years, and you can never kill them. Some people call them 'crapplications.' Why waste your own infrastructure and IT staff to support these things?"

That's what IDC analyst Frank Gens told an audience at this week's Cloud Leadership Forum, a conference hosted by IDC and IDG Enterprise. Gens defined this category of applications as ones that benefit only a small number of users, yet the need to support them never seems to go away.

"If you can't kill them," Gens says, you should try to "squeeze as many of them onto a low-cost infrastructure" as possible.
While outsourcing "crapplications" to the cloud is a way to get started, Gens and other speakers said cloud computing is robust enough today that even mission-critical applications can be considered.

"I wouldn't say anything is off the table," said Capt. Nicholas Buck of the U.S. Navy, who played a key role in overhauling the IT infrastructure of the government's National Reconnaissance Office.

Certain complex legacy applications may be difficult to move into a cloud, whether the cloud be a public or private one, but anything that is running in a virtual machine may be easily migrated, he said. "If it's running in virtual machines and it's essentially a cloud already, why not put it in a cloud?" Buck said.

The idea of putting mission-critical applications into cloud computing services has worried some because of concerns about security, availability and vendor lock-in.

"We hear a lot about vendor lock-in in the cloud," said Brian Boruff, vice president of emerging technologies at CSC. "One of the services people are looking for is a broker. Pull me out of cloud A and put me into cloud B."

CIO Ken Harris of Shaklee Corp. in Pleasanton, Calif., which has outsourced roughly half of its IT services to cloud vendors, said he examines cloud-based alternatives for every type of application. Shaklee uses the cloud for finance, call center, human resources, business management and various other types of apps.

"We will consider a cloud-based solution for any and every business need," Harris said.

But in some cases, Harris has investigated cloud services and found them lacking. "You cannot give up stability, performance and availability just to go to the cloud," he said.

Speakers and attendees at the Cloud Leadership Forum raised various concerns, regarding identity and access management across multiple cloud vendors, ability to comply with government regulations, as well as integration of cloud services with existing business processes.

Security consistently tops the list of customer concerns about cloud computing, but Gens suggested that security risks have been overstated.