The benefits of shifting applications to cloud are self-evident – ease of deployment, pay-per-use billing, massive scalability, access to new features – but they do not apply equally to all workloads. The growing diversity of IT venues has created increasingly complex environments, with hundreds or thousands of applications spanning on-premises and off-premises locations and encompassing platform, infrastructure and software services. This creates challenges in terms of control, security, and expense.

Yet when planned and executed thoughtfully, an enterprise-wide IT modernization and migration strategy can streamline operations and speed development in ways that materially benefit the business. The keys to doing this with confidence are to take inventory of everything that’s in the IT estate, determine the dependencies and requirements of the applications within it, establish the best venue and deployment model from the range of possibilities, and know the effort required to adapt workloads to new environments and vice versa. Getting it wrong can be painful and expensive due to wasted effort, opportunity cost and, in the worst case, transformational paralysis.

Ultimately, the calculation that goes into workload placement must balance technical, financial and business needs. Certain applications and scenarios are ‘low-hanging fruit’ for public cloud deployment, while others will likely need to stay on-premises. But few workloads fall neatly into these buckets, and strategic decisions about whether to modernize or move them need to be continually revisited within the context of the larger enterprise based on existing IT assets, new technologies, transformation initiatives and business needs.