I'd reflect on Pearl's response and look at why you want to make the move. At present, in my opinion, cost is unlikely to be a major factor if your services run 24/7, although if you have a substantial batch requirement that could, perhaps run for 8 hours and then be shut down that may save some costs.

My view is that the cloud presents a different delivery model, it's ubiquitous, the services it provides tend to be one size fits all, it can achieve high levels of availability, if that's taken into account in application design, and it's Opex rather than Capex.

That being the case, I'd look at the business capabilities the IT portfolio is supporting and at their non functional requirements. They might suggest that cloud would be the better delivery platform.

Perhaps if the organisation carries out R&D activities, not necessarily in the IT space, and so rapidly provisioned infrastructure that can be torn down in a few weeks or months could be useful. Or, if the organisation is small / medium sized and wants to access some ERP or CRM capabilities it may provide a solution that wasn't previously accessible.

Cameron, I tend to agree with Joel. The first step, deciding where to put what application is fundamentally a strategy discussion. It is related to the nature of the application and the data. The second step, reviewing if the application can be migrated to where it is supposed to be (private, managed or public cloud), the discussion becomes technical. Does the application consists in a series of loosely coupled "services" tied together through data sources? Again, none of this is vendor specific. The third step, performing the appropriate transformation (re-host, re-architect, re-place, encapsulate) is vendor specific as you have to take into account the technology provided. But that's the last step and it has more to do with implementation than with the actual doing.

Hi, Cameron, timely discussion which represent the similar concerns for majority of CIOs today, is cloud the opportnities or the risk, I agree with Joe, before exploring How, define the "What", I may add, before defining What, start with WHY? Why do you need step into the cloud? through deep analyzing the biggest challenging facing in your IT, for example, statistically now many organizations spent 70%+of their resources on legacy infrastructure maintenance & operational projects, worrying about upgrades to hardware and software, IT has the reputation as cost center to play the role as firefighter or controller, many other noble purposes regarding value/people/profit  such as: how to improve customer satisfaction and employees' roductivities.etc.http://futureofcio.blogspot.com/2012/03/three-steps-to-craft-good-cloud.html

Going back to the HOW, prestigious consulting companies may have some handy framework to take advantage for, on the other hand, CIOs need orchestrate their Cloud architecture framework/methodology to harmonize with their own enterprise architecture/business capability map regarding the flavor of cloud and the speed of adoptation. In the other word, CIO need become the master of Cloud, to explore both strategy and methodology step by step with solid footprint. thanks

I am so glad you asked this question!  Full disclosure up front: this type of question was the genesis behind the start of the company I work for - Adaptivity Inc.  www.adaptivity.com

Your question specifically asks "Where can I find...".  I would love to be able to point you to a list of methods that you could choose from but unfortunately I am simply not aware of any methods or tools other than Adaptivity's that do this.  There are of course plenty of firms that offer cloud consulting but its tough ensure you do not end up with expensive shelfware or a protracted consulting engagement that does not provide near term results.

That said I promise I will try my best to answer your question as objectively and concisely as possible to point you in the right direction. J

First off, I want to compliment you on the application-centric perspective you are taking here.  Taking an application centric approach is absolutely the right way to approach cloud migration. It is applications that directly support a business, not the gear in the datacenter. Too often when planning and executing cloud migrations people only look at current state infrastructure usage for decisoning.  In my experience this is bad news.  This assumes that an application is 100% fulfilling the demands of the business and there is no opportunity for improvement.  Also, taking an infrastructure-centric approach does little to address the risk of “breaking” application dependencies and potentially impacting the business.

There are a few ways to approach this, top down (business driven) and bottoms-up (current state application deployment).  Both are valid but for this example I will use a, admittedly simplified, top-down approach. If I were to highlight the major steps to consider they would be as follows:

1. Document your key business functions and activities, then quantify what’s important to them and what demand they place on your portfolio: Reduced risk? Agility? CapEx cost savings? High level of global availability? Strict regulatory requirements?
2. Inventory your application portfolio and align it to your business activities:  This should include collecting information about the applications such as demographics, implementation and business relevance. The goal here is to understand what applications support what business activities and to have the information necessary to make fact based informed decisions.
3. Understand the applications key workload performance characteristics: Low-latency? Intense Numerical Processing? This can be difficult and time without leveraging a toolset or method but I must say is very important. The reason I say this is that ALL CLOUDS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL. I think I actually preach about this every day.  But my point is this: getting two virtual machines from two different cloud providers with the same configuration on paper (e.g. 2 CPUs 4GB of RAM attached to 1TB of storage) does not mean they will perform the same.  They will absolutely have different characteristics so it is important to quantify what the required performance characteristics will need to be for an application to be supported properly.  This is critical when choosing a cloud provider.

So, after completing these three steps you should have collected enough information to intelligently decision as to what application you would like to move, and have the basis of the performance capabilities required by the future state cloud platform.  One more suggestion for you, if you have applications that are complex, not well documented, or business critical you may want to consider building out a current state deployment blueprints that highlight application inter-dependencies and shows infrastructure dependencies.  This will help mitigate unnecessary risk as you migrate those applications.

I hope this helps!

Jason