Moving to the Cloud: 7 Workloads That Are Ready for Cloud Transition

In 2020, cloud service providers significantly expanded their range of services. This, coupled with a huge increase in remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic, caused IT decision makers to migrate several categories of workload and data to cloud platforms. The benefits were obvious. Many cloud services are available in a pay-for-usage pricing model, meaning you do not pay for excess capacity. Also, you can outsource equipment and software maintenance to off-premise providers. Finally, a distributed cloud model greatly reduces your dependence on the geographic proximity of applications and their data. 

At a recent symposium, Gartner proposed that cloud adoption could benefit certain applicationsOpens a new window . “By 2022, 75% of organizations that implemented work-from-home policies for their workforce during COVID-19 will retain the remote working options for their employees,” said Ed Anderson, Distinguished VP Analyst, during his presentation at virtual Gartner IT Symposium 2020. “Cloud adoption will continue to accelerate as key workloads are needed to support remote workers and maintain data center operations.”

However, not every type of workload will benefit from cloud implementation. Some categories of applications and data need to remain on-premise. These include applications accessing highly-secure data or data where there are privacy concerns. In addition, you must be extremely careful when migrating mission-critical or performance-critical applications off-premise, as they may now be vulnerable to network slowdowns and outages. Finally, some applications and data that are subject to compliance regulations or legal restrictions should be analyzed carefully before migration. This is especially true for business continuity and disaster recovery.

As noted by Miguel Angel Borrega, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, “In many organizations, cloud adoption decisions were made by line-of-business leaders without central IT governance, creating inefficiencies and a large number of cloud vendors for I&O to manage. Through 2024, 80% of companies that are unaware of the mistakes made in their cloud adoption will overspend by 20 to 50%.”

Below we list the seven workloads that Gartner recommends are best-suited for cloud migration and how IT decision makers (ITDMs) should understand these trends. Toolbox explains why these applications are the best candidates for a cloud-powered transformation and how organizations weighing their cloud migration strategies can benefit from it.  

Even if an immediate cloud deployment isn’t on the radar, keeping an eye on the trends can help ITDMs make more informed decisions about which applications are primed for transition should the time ever come.

Learn More: Cloud Migration Planning: Top 3 Challenges and Best Practices 

Top Seven Cloud-Ready Workloads Ripe for Migration

#1 – Mobile Applications

These include some remote work applications, excluding virtual and remote desktop that are covered below. They also include those taking advantage of mobile devices. Cloud is an excellent landing place for maintaining these apps because their hardware resource demands are highly variable while the data usage is low to moderate. Thus, these applications can benefit from cloud implementation of the workload while much of the data remains on-premise.

#2 – Collaboration and Content Management

Here, collaboration refers to human partnerships in technology design and usage. They include team-based agile software design, multi-author document creation and collaboration-based apps such as Office 365. While content management is not necessarily cheaper or better performing in the cloud, it does allow for expansion of more remote human interaction. 

One exception to this category is applications having governance concerns. This includes things like compliance with regulations and legal requirements. For example, new regulations requiring privacy filters or regular reporting to authorities may result in an application not being cost-effective in the cloud, as regular outages may be required for compliance.

#3 – Videoconferencing

Videoconferences are an obvious example of the advantages of cloud adoption. Video requires a high network bandwidth and its resource usage is highly-variable yet somewhat predictable.

#4 – Virtual Desktop and Remote Desktop

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a large proportion of service employees working from home. This had a significant effect on the use of virtual and remote desktop solutions. As the workforce disperses across geography, supporting it from an on-premise data center becomes more expensive. Another issue is hardware and software maintenance and support. IT support would normally coordinate the rollout of hardware upgrades and software updates for on-premise workers. As these workers move to work-from-home, virtual and remote desktop solutions is a must to control the wide variety of hardware platforms and operating system choices.

A cloud implementation means centralizing and simplifying virtual desktop support, perhaps even outsourcing this to service providers, resulting in cost savings.

Learn More: When Cloud Is Not Reliable: 4 Tips to Deal With Cloud Outages

#5 – Scale-Out Applications

As workloads grow, they hit resource limits, requiring additional resources such as memory, CPU power, storage capacity and network bandwidth. Scale-out applications are those having a distributed architecture such as a multi-cloud implementation. Some cloud providers have a feature that will increase resource availability when needed. AWS Auto ScalingOpens a new window is one example.

However, some mission-critical scale-out applications will not benefit from cloud migration. These are typically high-performance, data-intensive workloads that perform best when the workload is co-located with its data. Enterprise data warehouse and big data applications are examples of these, especially when they are integrated with transactional applications. For example, an operational system that handles product or service purchasing (which can benefit from the cloud) may require executing one or more big data queries to detect financial fraud. Moving that big data application to the cloud would typically not save time, money or resources, since big data queries and result sets are typically small and the big data application is almost always configured with a scale-up architecture.

#6 – Disaster Recovery

During the Expo, Gartner Analyst Ed Anderson predicted that 50% of organizations will increase their budgets for cloud-based disaster recoveryOpens a new window (DR) solutions by 2023. “The cost-effectiveness of using a pay-per-use environment to support unexpected failover requirements that cloud-based disaster recovery solutions offer is sought after in current times,” Anderson said.

While this may indicate that an IT disaster recovery (DR) plan should be cloud-based, DR plans usually contain multiple levels and degrees of disaster, including single hardware unit failure, network failure, electric power failure and site failures. IT decision makers should distinguish between migrating DR processes to the cloud and locating DR backup data in the cloud. Some geographically-local disasters such as single unit hardware failures may not benefit from DR processes and data in the cloud. On the other hand, a site failure may require a cloud-based DR solution, including a secondary site. 

One additional issue to address is compliance. Some service providers require standardized and regularly tested DR plans. For example, if you are a merchant of any size accepting credit cards, you must be in compliance with Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Council standards.

#7 – Business Continuity

Business continuity (BC) is part of disaster planning. While DR is concerned mostly with backup and recovery of data and applications, business continuity focuses at a higher level on business processes. IT uses disaster recovery plans to recover from a disaster, while it uses business continuity plans to continue to function before, during and after a disaster. 

According to a Gartner survey, in 2020, only 12% of respondents said their business operations were continuing as normal due to COVID-19. Part of this is because of the human factor: DR planning can return your systems and applications to normal, but you still have employees in both internal service and customer-facing positions that are critical to keeping your company viable. There may also be business locations requiring on-premise employees to function, such as bank tellers, retail clerks and customer service representatives. 

The DR segment of business continuity may well be suitable for cloud adoption; however, most of the human element of business continuity should be planned and executed locally. This would argue for a cost-effective multi-cloud migration of BC data and applications.

Learn More:  Cloud Isn’t Always the Answer: Issues to Consider Before Migrating to the Cloud 

Summing Up

In 2020,  IT leaders increasingly leaned on cloud services to replace existing legacy systems. In other words, spending on traditional IT solutions is being reallocated to cloud. This results in what Gartner calls cloud shiftOpens a new window . 

While Gartner recommends that the above seven workloads be migrated to the cloud in 2021, there are some exceptions. Some applications should remain on-premise, especially where security or data privacy are concerns. In addition, some workloads are heavily-dependent upon performance for their viability, and moving them to the cloud may put these applications at the mercy of occasionally poor network performance. Finally, legal or regulatory compliance should be reviewed carefully when contemplating a cloud migration, as these applications may be subject to massive changes due to regulatory changes.

Are there any applications that are not fit for cloud migration yet? Let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!