2010 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing

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

Ali Khajeh-Hosseini David Greenwood Ian Sommerville

Cloud Computing Co-laboratory
School of Computer Science
University of St Andrews, UK
{akh, dsg22, ifs}@cs.st-andrews.ac.uk

Abstract — This case study illustrates the potential benefits and financial and socio-technical enterprise issues that decision-
risks associated with the migration of an IT system in the oil & makers should consider during the migration of IT systems
gas industry from an in-house data center to Amazon EC2 to the cloud.
from a broad variety of stakeholder perspectives across the This case study identifies the potential benefits and risks
enterprise, thus transcending the typical, yet narrow, financial associated with the migration of the studied system from the
and technical analysis offered by providers. Our results show perspectives of: project managers, technical managers,
that the system infrastructure in the case study would have support managers, support staff, and business development
cost 37% less over 5 years on EC2, and using cloud computing staff. The paper is based upon data collected from an IT
could have potentially eliminated 21% of the support calls for
solutions company considering the migration of one of their
this system. These findings seem significant enough to call for a
migration of the system to the cloud but our stakeholder
systems to Amazon EC2. This Infrastructure-as-a-Service
impact analysis revealed that there are significant risks (IaaS) layer of the cloud is arguably the most accessible to
associated with this. Whilst the benefits of using the cloud are enterprise as they could potentially migrate their systems to
attractive, we argue that it is important that enterprise the cloud without having to change their applications. In
decision-makers consider the overall organizational addition, Amazon Machine Images are readily available for
implications of the changes brought about with cloud enterprise applications such as Oracle Database and Citrix
computing to avoid implementing local optimizations at the XenApp (http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/solution-
cost of organization-wide performance. providers/).
The paper is structured such that: the background section
Enterprise cloud computing; cloud migration; cloud introduces the proposed migration project and looks at
adoption; IaaS; organizational change related work in this area; the methodology section describes
the approach used to collect and analyze data; the results
I. INTRODUCTION section identifies the cost saving benefits of using cloud
computing and its affect on the support and maintenance of
Over the last few years startup companies such as Twitter the system under investigation; the organizational benefits
(www.twitter.com) and Animoto (www.animoto.com) have and risks of the migration are also discussed in the results
used clouds to build highly scalable systems. However, section; the paper concludes by discussing the main points
cloud computing is not just for startups; enterprises are revealed by this case study and looking at future work.
attracted to cloud-based services as cloud providers market
their services as being superior to in-house data centers in II. BACKGROUND
terms of financial and technical dimensions e.g. more cost
effective, equally or perhaps more reliable, and highly A. Proposed Migration Project
scalable [1, 2, 3, 4]. Whilst the technological and financial
The case study organization is a UK based SME that
benefits may be seductive, it is important that enterprise
provides bespoke IT solutions for the Oil & Gas industry. It
decision-makers factor in other dimensions, the overall
comprises of around 30 employees with offices in the UK
organizational implications of the change, to avoid ignoring
and the Middle East. It has an organizational structure based
other significant factors and thus implementing local
on functional divisions: Administration; Engineering;
optimizations at the cost of organization-wide performance.
Support; of which Engineering is the largest department.
There are currently few case studies that investigate the
The migration use-case comprises the feasibility of the
migration of existing IT systems to the cloud [5].
migration of one of the organization’s primary service
Furthermore, little has been published about the implications
offerings (a quality monitoring and data acquisition system)
of cloud computing from an enterprise or organizational
to Amazon EC2. The following is an anonymized description
perspective [6].
of the situation: Company C is a small oil and gas company
This paper’s original contribution is to address these
who owns some offshore assets in the North Sea oilfields.
issues by presenting the results of a case study that
Company C needed a data acquisition system to allow them
investigated the migration of an IT system from a company’s
to manage their offshore operations by monitoring data from
in-house data center to Amazon EC2 (www.aws.amazon.
their assets on a minute by minute basis. Company C’s assets
com). The primary focus of the case study was on the
rely on the production facilities of Company A (a major oil

978-0-7695-4130-3/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE 450

DOI 10.1109/CLOUD.2010.37
company), therefore the data comes onshore via Company B. Related Work
A’s communication links. Company C does not have the Cloud computing is not just about a technological
capabilities to develop their own IT systems, hence they improvement in data centers; it represents a fundamental
outsourced the development and management of the system change in how IT is provisioned and used [7]. For enterprises
to Company B, which is an IT solutions company with a to use cloud computing, they have to consider the benefits,
small data center. Fig. 1 provides an overview of the system, risks and effects of cloud computing on their organizations.
which consists of two servers: Case studies provide an effective way to investigate these
1) A database server that logs and archives the data areas in real-life organizations. This section takes a brief
coming in from offshore into a database. A tape drive is look at the related work in each of these three areas.
used to take daily backups of the database, the tapes are Armbrust et al [1] argued that elasticity is an important
stored off-site. economic benefit of cloud computing as it transfers the costs
2) An application server that hosts a number of data of resource over-provisioning and the risks of under-
reporting and monitoring applications. The end users at provisioning to cloud providers. Motahari-Nezhad et al [8]
Company C access these applications using a remote added that the potentially reduced operational and
desktop client over the internet. maintenance costs is also important from a business
perspective. Walker [9] also looked into the economics of
cloud computing, and pointed out that lease-or-buy decisions
have been researched in economics for more than 40 years.
Walker used this insight to develop a model for comparing
the cost of a CPU hour when it is purchased as part of a
server cluster, with when it is leased (e.g. from Amazon
EC2). Walker's model was a good first step in developing
models to aid decision makers, but it was too narrow in
scope as it focused only on the cost of a CPU hour.
Klems et al [10] presented as a framework that could be
used to compare the costs of using cloud computing with
more conventional approaches, such as using in-house IT
infrastructure. Their framework was very briefly evaluated
using two case studies. However, no results were provided
because the framework was at an early developmental stage
and more conceptual than concrete. In contrast, we provide
detailed results by comparing the costs of using an in-house
data center with AWS for our case study.
Figure 1. System overview From an enterprise perspective, security, legal and
privacy issues seem to present a number of risks as pointed
The system infrastructure was deployed in Company B’s out by detailed reports from the Cloud Security Alliance [11]
data center and went live in 2005. Since then, Company B’s and European Network and Information Security Agency
support department have been maintaining the system and [12]. Others have discussed risks posed by a cloud’s
solving any problems that have risen. This case study geographic location [13], legal issues that affect UK-based
investigated how the same system could be deployed using organisations [14], and the technical security risks of using
the cloud offerings of Amazon Web Services. Fig. 2 provides cloud computing [15].
an overview of this scenario, where Company B deploys and However, not much has been published about the
maintains the same system in the cloud. organizational risks of the change that cloud computing
brings to enterprise. Yanosky [16] discussed how cloud
computing will affect the authority of the IT department
within universities and argued that the IT department's role
will change from “provider to certifier, consultant and
arbitrator”. This could lead to inefficiencies in organizations
if certain stakeholders resist the changes brought about by
cloud computing. One approach to understanding these risks
is to capture each stakeholders’ perception of the change
through semi-structured interviews allowing stakeholders to
raise the benefits, risks, opportunities or concerns as they
perceive them [17, 18].
The results of the case study presented in this paper are
novel as they attempt to highlight the overall organizational
implications of using cloud computing. This issue has not
Figure 2. System deployed in the cloud

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been discussed to any significant extent in the previously Server 2003 OS), a tape drive, network equipment, a server
mentioned literature. rack, shelf spares. In addition, Company C pays £43,000 per
year to Company B for system support and maintenance,
III. METHODOLOGY £3,600 of which is for the running costs of the system
This case study involved fieldwork at Company B’s infrastructure.
offices between May to July 2009. Initially, all documents Over a five year period, the total cost of the system
relating to the system under investigation were gathered and infrastructure is therefore: £19,400 + (5 x £3,600) = £37,400.
studied. The fieldwork had three stages: We acknowledge that hardware performance has changed
Stage 1: The infrastructure costs of the system were since 2005 and perhaps it may be perceived that costs should
calculated from project reports and invoices. These costs have reduced, however in reality they remain similar. For
were compared with the costs of a similar infrastructure example, the servers used by Company C cost £4,525 in
setup on Amazon EC2. 2005, the ones used in a similar project in 2009 cost £4,445.
Stage 2: Company B has a database of all support and Amazon EC2 provides an option of using either small or
maintenance issues regarding the systems that they support. large server instances depending on the amount of CPU
This database was manually researched and all of the support power and RAM required. The system could initially run on
calls that would potentially be affected by the migration were two small instances as the application and database server do
identified and analyzed. not seem to be under a heavy load. However, this could be
Stage 3: The results from the above two stages were used changed for large instances if the performance is found to be
to produce a poster. The poster was presented to Company unacceptable. This would not have been possible using the
B’s employees and six semi-structured interviews were existing approach since all hardware must be purchased
performed at their offices. The interviews started by giving before the system is deployed, and cannot easily be changed
the interviewees an overview of Amazon EC2 as they were afterwards.
only partially familiar with this technology. Each interview Table 1 shows a comparison of the costs of the system
was recorded and a transcript of each interview was infrastructure, the amounts have been rounded to the nearest
produced. Each transcript was read be two researchers (one £10. The following specifications were used to calculate the
present at the interview and one not) and a number of issues costs of running the system on AWS: two Microsoft
were identified and agreed using a stakeholder impact Windows On-Demand instance (AWS do not offer reserved
analysis. instances for Windows) in Europe running 730 hours per
Stakeholder impact analysis is a method of identifying month (i.e. 24x7); 20GB data transfer in; 20GB data transfer
potential sources of benefits and risks from the perspectives out; 200GB EBS storage (i.e. amount of effective storage on
of multiple stakeholders, and is performed by analyzing existing servers), 100 million EBS I/O request; 30GB EBS
interview transcripts. It comprises of: snapshot storage (for daily backups); 10 snapshot GET
1) Identifying key stakeholders; requests (in case backups need to be retrieved); 30 snapshot
2) Identifying changes in what tasks they would be PUT requests (for daily backups).
required to perform and how they were to perform them; TABLE I. COMPARISON OF INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS BETWEEN
3) Identifying what the likely consequences of the CLOUD AND COMPANY B’S DATA CENTER
changes are with regards to stakeholders time, resources, Amazon Server Instances
capabilities, values, status and satisfaction; Cmpny
Period 1 small +
4) Analyzing these changes within the wider context of 2 small 2 large B
1 large
relational factors such as tense relationships between 1 Month £200 £390 £590 £620
individuals or groups to which stakeholders belong; 1 Year £2,400 £4,680 £7,080 £7,440
5) Determining whether the stakeholder will perceive 5 Years £12,000 £23,400 £35,400 £37,200
the change as unjust (either procedurally or distributively)
based upon changes and their relational context. From Company B’s perspective, the cloud presents an
The results of the case study fieldwork are discussed in opportunity to bid for new projects without having to worry
the next section. about space in their data center as they are currently running
out of rack space, and building a new data centre is an
IV. RESULTS expensive venture. It also means that they could propose a
cheaper alternative to deploying systems in their in-house
A. Infrastructure Costs data center for their clients.
Company C paid £104,000 to Company B for the system From Company C’s perspective (the end users), Table 1
in 2005, £19,400 of which was for the system’s shows that the cost of running their system in the cloud is
infrastructure; the rest of the costs were for system cheaper than using Company B’s data center. For example, it
development and deployment. The infrastructure included would be 37% cheaper to deploy the system in the cloud
two servers (each having two Intel Xeon 3.4GHz processors, assuming that a small and a large server instance are used.
2GB RAM, 6 x 72GB hard drives in a RAID 10 array Furthermore, no upfront capital is required for infrastructure
resulting in around 200GB of effective storage, Windows in the cloud since users are charged on a monthly basis. The
potential cost reductions certainly seem significant, but the

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affects of a migration on the support and maintenance of the
systems must also be considered.
B. Support and Maintenance
The system is currently supported and maintained by
Company B’s support department who also perform regular
health checks to ensure that the system is running as
expected. The health checks involve checking error logs,
backup logs, server load levels, communication links etc.
The support and maintenance of the system would be
affected if the system was migrated to the cloud since the
support department would no longer have full control over
the system infrastructure.
Company B maintains a database of all the support calls
they receive by telephone or email either externally from end
users or internally from support engineers doing regular Figure 3. Overview of support calls
heath checks. Since the system went live in 2005, 218
support calls have been made regarding the operation of the
system. The majority of these calls were about software C. Stakeholder Impact Analysis
problems, however, the titles of all calls were studied and a Analysis of the interview data suggests that the proposed
shortlist of 112 calls was made for further investigation. It cloud migration would have a positive net benefit from the
was found that the following 45 calls were related to the perspective of the business development functions of the
system’s infrastructure: enterprise and the more junior levels of the IT support
x 38 calls were related to backup problems between functions. A perceived zero net benefit was perceived by the
the database server and the tape drive. Common project management and support management functions of
problems included faulty tapes, failed backup the enterprise. A negative net benefit was perceived by the
attempts, and even loose cables presumably related technical manager and the support engineer functions of the
to tapes being taken in and out of the drive on a daily enterprise.
basis. These problems were usually fixed by erasing Stakeholder impact analysis data suggests that there are
the tapes, rebooting the tape drive or re-running numerous potential benefits but also risks associated with the
backup scripts, but there were a few occasions when migration of the system to the cloud. Tables 2 and 3
no backup was taken for that day. summarize the benefits and risks of the migration as
x 5 calls were related to network problems, one of identified by the stakeholder impact analysis. The second
which required a router to be rebooted, and another column in Tables 2 and 3 refers to the number of specific
that was caused by a power cable being unplugged benefits/risks identified, and hence indicates the distribution
accidentally. of benefit or risk across different areas. Twelve specific
x 2 calls were related to power outages at Company benefits were identified in contrast to eighteen specific risks.
B’s data center. According to the analysis the largest source of benefit to be
The previously mentioned calls could potentially have derived from the cloud providing an opportunity to manage
been eliminated if the system was deployed in the cloud income and outgoings in a new way, followed by the
since Amazon would be responsible for hardware related opportunities to offer new products/service, improved job
issues. As shown in Fig. 3, this accounts for around 21% of status and removal of tedious work. The largest source of
the support calls but it should be noted that some additional risk will be derived from the potential deterioration of
calls might be introduced if the system was migrated to the ‘customer care and service quality’, ‘increased dependence
cloud. These cloud related issues could include power on 3rd party’, decrease in satisfying work and increases of
outages at Amazon’s data centers or network latency issues; workload.
however, the important point is that these issues would be
TABLE II. SOURCES OF BENEFIT IDENTIFIED BY STAKEHOLDER IMPACT
dealt with by Amazon. This could be seen as a big advantage ANALYSIS
for Company B’s support department as it allows them to
focus on software related issues, which are more important to Benefits #
the end users. Opportunity to manage income & outgoings 3
Opportunity to offer new products/services 2
Improved status 2
Removal of tedious work 2
Improve satisfaction of work 1
Opportunity to develop new skills 1
Opportunity for organizational growth 1

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 TABLE III. SOURCES OF RISK IDENTIFIED BY STAKEHOLDER IMPACT to improve the satisfaction of their work. It is an opportunity
ANALYSIS
for support engineers to shed unsatisfying routine and
Risks # potentially time consuming work such as performance of
hardware support, network support and switching backup
Deterioration of customer care & service quality 3 tapes as well as being offered new challenges in terms of
Increased dependence on external 3rd party 3 cloud administration. This is a benefit as support engineers
Decrease of satisfying work 3 can focus on more satisfying and value-adding work such as
resolving customers’ software support requests. This benefit
Departmental downsizing 2
is enabled by the switch to cloud-infrastructure as the third
Uncertainty with new technology 2 party cloud provider would be responsible for the more
Lack of supporting resources 1 routine maintenance.
Lack of understanding of the cloud 1 Technical developers could also benefit from the
migration as they can be involved in systems support (e.g.
performing regular system health checks), which are
D. Benefits sometimes viewed as a chore. In small organizations, there is
1) Opportunity to manage income & outgoings not usually a clear distinction between the roles of system
Introducing third party cloud infrastructure solutions administrators and technical developers, and different people
presents itself as an opportunity to improve the management have to be involved when there is a problem.
of income and outgoings for both finance staff and Third party cloud infrastructure solutions present an
customers. Third party cloud infrastructure solutions opportunity for sales and marketing staff to create new
facilitate the easing of cash-flow management for finance product/service offerings that better fit the customers need in
staff as the cloud pricing model has minimal upfront cost and terms of scalability and cost effectiveness in contrast to an
monthly billing, and it also minimizes variability of in-house data center. This is a benefit as this provides staff
expenditure on electricity. These are a benefit, in contrast to with a new and potentially satisfying challenges that would
in-house data center, as upfront costs of buying hardware are not have existed without the migration to cloud-
high and clients can be slow to pay, resulting in cash-flow infrastructure.
difficulties. Additionally energy costs are a significant
outgoing and by using an external provider they would 4) Opportunity to develop new skills
benefit from providers ability to negotiate whole-sale energy Third party cloud infrastructure solutions present an
prices. opportunity for support managers, engineers, sales and
Third party cloud infrastructure solutions also surface marketing staff to develop new skills. For support managers
many opportunities for managing income for customers, and engineers it is an opportunity to develop new skills in
sales and marketing staff, as new pricing models can be cloud computing administration. This is a benefit as the
offered to them. This is a benefit, in contrast to internal data support engineers will expand their existing skill sets and
centers which require a pricing to model comprising of a experience with knowledge of managing a technology that
large upfront fee plus monthly support costs (due to cash- will be in demand throughout the IT industry for years to
flow issues), as customers can be offered more choice over come. For sales and marketing staff it presents an
how they want pay or alternatively the finance department opportunity to develop skills is product/service creation and
can choose to get the infra-structure outsourcer to bill their launching. This is a benefit to sales and marketing staff as it
customers directly reducing the finance departments’ will expand their existing skill sets and experience enabling
administrative burden. their career progression.

2) Improved status 5) Opportunity for organizational growth

Introducing third party cloud infrastructure solutions Third party cloud infrastructure solution presents an
present an opportunity for support management and support opportunity for sales and marketing staff to create new
engineers to improve their status. Support managers can product/service offerings that may appeal to a larger market-
improve their status in the organisation by successfully share due to cloud-infrastructures properties of scalability
championing the high profile migration that has strategic and its cost effectiveness in contrast to an in-house data
implications. This is a benefit to the support manager as by center. This is a benefit as it may facilitate sales staff
working with new and potentially prestigious technology it meeting targets by enabling them to target market segments
may lead to career progression and increased job satisfaction. previously not attracted by limitations of scalability.
Support engineers would also benefit by improving their E. Risks
status within their industry by developing sought after cloud
administration skills and experience. 1) Deterioration of customer care & service quality
Third party cloud infrastructure solutions present a risk to
3) Improve satisfaction of work customer care and overall service quality for support
Third party cloud infrastructure solutions present an managers, support engineers and customer care staff.
opportunity for support engineers, sales and marketing staff Support managers and engineers are at risk of becoming
dependent upon a cloud service provider which they have no

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control over and at risk of requiring additional resources to may lose their jobs and the support managers may lose
do the migration and deal with short term issues that arise influence as they have a small department.
subsequent to the migration (e.g. shortfalls in cloud
operations knowledge resulting in tasks taking temporarily 4) Uncertainty with new technology
longer to complete). Support managers and engineers Third party cloud infrastructure implementations present
specifically risk becoming dependent upon a cloud service a risk to the finance/business development staff as it may
provider for resolving hardware and network issues. This is a open the organization to long-term volatility derived from
risk as it could result in the deterioration of service quality market forces associated with the costs of using a cloud and
that the support manager would not be able to control. data transfer costs. This is a risk as the medium to long-term
Support managers also risk temporarily requiring more viability of a cloud solution versus an internal hosting
resources to cope with migration and also the relative lack of solution are uncertain. Additionally, switching to external
knowledge and experience held by support staff regarding hosting decreases the certainty of customer lock-in in terms
cloud systems. This is a risk because staff may initially of software support contracts as now the hardware is
require more time to perform the same tasks due to the time maintained externally and therefore the company can no
required to learn how to perform tasks in the cloud longer make the case that it offers an ‘all-in-one’
environment, which could compromise service quality and maintenance contract which avoids having to deal with
customer service. multiple contactors. Another consideration is the loss of in-
Customer care staff are also at risk of not being able to house expertise resulting in additional barriers to bringing
offer the existing levels of customer service as it may take the system back in-house if the cloud provider is inadequate.
longer to resolve customer queries as cooperation with
external service providers may become necessary. This is a 5) Lack of supporting resources
risk because response times to deal with customer queries Third party cloud infrastructure implementations present
may increase resulting in back-logs and cascades of a risk resource scarcity in IT support and sales/marketing
additional work as customer call back for progress updates departments. There is a risk of temporarily upsizing the IT
and will result in customer care staff dissatisfaction. support departments to cope with migration and also the
relative lack of knowledge and experience held my support
2) Decrease in satisfaction engineers regarding cloud systems. This is a risk because
Third party cloud infrastructure implementations present staff may initially require more time to perform the same
a risk of decreasing job satisfaction of support engineers, tasks due to having to learn how-to do so in the cloud
sales & marketing staff, and customer care staff. Support environment. There is a risk of temporarily upsizing
engineers risk decreasing job satisfaction as work may shift sales/marketing to cope with the creation and launch of new
from a hands-on technical role to reporting and chasing up cloud based products/services. This is a risk because sales
issues with third party service providers. Support engineers and marketing staff will need to develop appropriate
will become dependent upon the responsiveness of third strategies and materials to ensure the marketplace is aware of
party service providers to resolve problems thus reducing the the product offering.
level of control support engineers have over resolving issues. In summary these results illustrate that whilst the
This is a risk to support engineer satisfaction as they financial and technological analyses are certainly important,
derive satisfaction from technical aspects of work and the organizational dimension should also be considered. This
rapidly resolving problems to customer satisfaction. Sales should be particularly considered from service quality and
and marketing staff risk of decreasing job satisfaction if they customer care perspective, and the organizational
are set unrealistic goals regarding the selling of the new governance and risk implications of being so highly
cloud based services. This is a risk to sales and marketing’s dependent upon a third party for product/service delivery to
satisfaction as they derive satisfaction from meeting sales customers. In some cases, the financial dimension may not
and market share targets. Customer care staff also risk even be the primary consideration for business-critical
decreasing job satisfaction because their ability to perform applications. These findings are reinforced by the fact that at
their job will be dependent upon third parties out of their present the majority of management at the organization is
control resulting in a greater lag between customer queries reluctant to implement the change beyond a test environment
and resolution. despite the financial incentives as the risks are perceived to
outweigh the lost savings.
3) Departmental downsizing
Third party cloud infrastructure implementations present V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
a risk of downsizing to IT support departments. IT support Cloud computing is a disruptive technology that is set to
departments are at risk of downsizing if the majority of their change how IT systems are deployed because of its
work comprises hardware and network support. This is a risk apparently cheap, simple and scalable nature. The findings of
because cloud providers will be responsible for maintaining this case study show that cloud computing can be a
these aspects of support making the capability unnecessary significantly cheaper alternative to purchasing and
within the IT support department. Both support managers maintaining system infrastructure in-house. Furthermore,
and support engineers will be impacted as support engineers cloud computing could potentially eliminate many support-

455
related issues since there would be no physical infrastructure cloud provider if the current provider is inadequate or raises
to maintain. Despite these advantages, this case study their cost plans, or even the costs associated with the loss of
showed that there are important socio-technical issues that experience/ knowledge if a company needs to re-deploy the
need to be considered before organisations could migrate system in-house. However these limitations are addressed
their IT systems to the cloud. qualitatively by the stakeholder impact analysis which
The system infrastructure in the case study would have identifies a range of non-quantifiables and evaluates their
cost 37% less over 5 years on Amazon EC2, and using cloud consequences.
computing could have potentially eliminated 21% of the An open issue for future research is that whilst it is clear
support calls for this system. These findings seem significant that from a financial perspective, end-users could benefit
enough to call for a migration of the system to the cloud but from cloud computing it is unclear whether it will
our stakeholder impact analysis revealed that there are materialize for the majority, as many organizations outsource
significant disadvantages tied to the promised benefits. The their IT to system integrators and it is at present unclear
disadvantages include risks to customer satisfaction and whether there is sufficient financial incentive for these
overall service quality due to diffusion of control to third system integrators. On first impression it may appear that
parties; decreased job satisfaction due to changes in nature of system integrators profits will not rise (assuming IaaS costs
work; and opening the organisation to long term cost are passed directly to the end-user) and may even be
volatility in terms of cloud-usage and data transfer costs. marginally less due to loss of small profits associated with
This case study has practical implications for industrial hardware sales. However this ignores the following facts:
practitioners assessing the benefits of external cloud 1) That the system integrator will be able to focus their
infrastructures for their organisation. The generic benefits resources and effort on performing value-adding and more
identified can be leveraged to gain buy-in from stakeholders profitable activities (e.g. system software support) rather
whilst the generic risks identified should be adapted into a than hardware builds and hardware maintenance;
risk register and monitored to ensure their projects do not fall
2) The system integrator will not be paying in-house
prey to common cloud infrastructure migration risks.
Additionally the stakeholder impact analysis method may be hosting costs e.g. electricity, cooling, off-site tape archiving.
adopted by enterprises and performed in-house to create a Both facts indicate that in the medium to long term the
bespoke understanding of their situation. integrator will be more profitable per unit of work
The limitations of this study are that the cost analysis performed. These arguments however require empirical
only focused on system infrastructure costs, and did not substantiation.
quantify: the cost of doing the actual migration work; how As part of future work, we will be working with
the support staff costs would be affected by the migration; Company B (the IT solutions company) who are currently
the cost of a support contract that might be required with considering the migration of non business-critical
AWS Premium Support (www.aws.amazon.com/premium applications such as those used in their training courses to
support). Support staff costs are difficult to quantify as they the cloud. We are also developing a collection of tools called
would first require the system to be migrated to the cloud the Cloud Adoption Toolkit to support decision-making
and run for a period of time to study any issues that would during the adoption of cloud computing in enterprise. Fig. 4
arise. There are also longer-term costs associated with the provides an overview of the Cloud Adoption Toolkit, which
migration of systems, such as the cost of migrating to another supports decision-makers in making trade-offs between the

Figure 4. Overview of the Cloud Adoption Toolkit

456
benefits and risks of using cloud computing. As shown in [4] Amazon Web Services, "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon
Fig. 4, the toolkit currently consists of 5 tools/techniques: EC2)," [Online]. Available: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ [Accessed:
Jan. 29, 2010].
Technology Suitability Analysis; Cost Modeling; Energy
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example, by modeling a system’s hardware infrastructure the ACM, vol. 52, 2009, pp. 50-56.
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