Keep Your Feet on the Ground When Moving Software into the Cloud

Cloud computing and Web 2.0 are the latest buzz words in the IT world. Cloud computing is on every software supplier’s website from Amazon to Yahoo!. Open any newspaper, business journal or computer magazine and you will find an article on cloud computing. The Gartner group reported that “Worldwide cloud services revenue is on pace to surpass $56.3 billion in 2009” [11]. What is cloud computing and what is all the hype about? There is a plethora of benefits with cloud computing but it is not without challenges. In this paper, we will explore what the term cloud computing means, and explore the advantages and disadvantages of migrating legacy applications into the cloud.