How to Ease Your Transition to the Cloud

Is your head in the "cloud" or at least thinking of going there?

Moving applications to the cloud can be complex, but upfront planning, useful migration tools, and experience can help simplify the process. Many factors must be considered when moving an application to the cloud: applications component, network stack, management, security, and orchestration. For enterprise IT professionals looking to move data, applications, or integrated solutions from the datacenter to the cloud, it is often useful to start with the knowledge and experience gained from previous work.

Cloud on-boarding is the deployment or migration of data, applications, or integrated solutions of compute, storage, and network resources to a public, private, or hybrid cloud. On-boarding addresses business needs, such as a spike in demand business needs, such as a spike in demand, business continuity, and capacity optimization. Enterprises can use on-boarding to address capacity demands without the need to deploy additional infrastructure. Cloud on-boarding should be considered in the design of overarching, enterprise-wide, cloud infrastructure that supports internal, external, and federated clouds. It provides a very compelling usage for enterprises who want to maximize the elastic capabilities of cloud computing.

The general premise of cloud on-boarding is to allow the cloud to act as an additional resource or extension of the datacenter for the following reasons:

Citrix and Intel have worked together to develop a reference architecture focused on cloud on-boarding and have identified important on-boarding considerations, as well as the key software tools and applications to make the effort successful.

To learn more about the Citrix solution for Cloud on-boarding visit www.citrix.com/cloud/cloudbridge.

Pete Downing is the Principle Product Manager in the Cloud Networking Group at Citrix Systems. Pete joined Citrix in 2006 and is involved with Citrix's cloud computing initiatives which include the Citrix NetScaler Cloud Bridge, Citrix OpenCloud On-Boarding Solution stack, and other key strategic cloud initiatives.

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