Wondering which IT systems or work load can be moved to Public Cloud to take advantage of its high cost benefit and at the sametime mitigate some of the concerns. The following is an broad categorization of systems/work loads which can be targeted for the different Cloud deployment models.

For Public Cloud

• Systems which do not deliver competitive advantage
• Systems which are not mission critical
• Work loads which do not handle core business
• Workloads which uses less sensitive data
• Work loads which are affected minimally by network latency or bandwidth
• Systems which are not tightly integrated to other critical systems
• Systems which use industry standard workflow and requires minimal customizations
• Infrastructure workloads like
  • Audio/video/Web conferencing
  • Test and development environments
  • Less sensitive data archiving

For Private Cloud

All the systems/work loads which have the characteristics opposite to or not mentioned in the previous section can be targeted for Private Cloud. Some examples are

• Work loads dealing with the high sensitive data like medical records
• Multiple, co-dependent mission critical systems like online transaction processing
• Work loads requiring high audibility and accountability like SOX
• Systems using third party software that do not have virtualization or cloud licensing strategy
• Work loads requiring detailed utilization measurement and charge back mechanisms

Like to hear your experience on other criteria used to choose workload that can be moved to Public Cloud.