Cloud Hosting

Picking the right Cloud hosting provider is among the most important decisions you'll make when planning the migration of your tier 1 applications. After all, Cloud providers that typically focus on developer services can quickly find themselves out of their depth when dealing with production applications.

"The requirements and capabilities that an organisation needs when running a production application are very different than one that's catering to developers," says Craig McLellan, cloud architecture author and chief technology officer of Hosting.com.

[Related: How to Choose Your Cloud Service Provider]

[Related: 10 Disaster Preparedness Questions to Ask Your Cloud Services Providers]

[Related: Is Your Cloud Provider Exposing Remnants of Your Data?]

Tier 1 applications often benefit the most from the efficiency and scalability offered by a Cloud environment, which provides:

However, the applications themselves are often the most complex and most critical to a business, and questions around stakeholder buy-in, architecture, and ISV support and licensing must be addressed before taking the plunge. Unlike tier 2 applications, which can usually be virtualised in a self-contained manner, your tier 1 applications touch on many people, processes and technologies.

Also, by their very nature, they tend to have been around for a while. They tend to run on legacy hardware, which can make the whole process more challenging.

Look to your disaster recovery plan first

As a first step, before even considering Cloud providers, McLellan recommends CIOs take a look at their disaster recovery plan for the application in question.

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5 signs your Cloud provider can't handle tier 1 apps