Organizations around the globe often find themselves hampered by expensive, high-maintenance systems based on proprietary hardware, and the best way out for them is to enhance their current infrastructure by migrating to a more robust environment. Migration is the most effective way forward for organizations that want to lay the foundation of a cost-effective, agile and future-proof system.

Three key migrations that are already helping organizations move ahead with the times are: cloud implementations, UNIX to Linux migrations and the shift to the Windows 7 platform. With these, organizations can increase their efficiency and agility, reduce costs, while ensuring Return on Investment (ROI) and mitigating certain risks.

The decision to migrate to the cloud depends on factors such as feasibility, ROI on migration and considerations such as security. CIOs need to focus on a few things.  First, within the enterprise they need to identify what is cloud-friendly. Many functions such as disaster recovery set-up and long term archival storage are considered cloud-friendly, while others might need more careful consideration. Secondly, based on the identified candidates,   CIOs need to choose the right type of cloud services and ones that accord most appropriate infrastructure, platform or application capabilities respectively.   Third, and often overlooked, is the need to put in place a sustainable monitoring and maintenance mechanism. This will ensure that enterprises get the most out the cloud infrastructure on an ongoing basis, and will ensure that expected benefits materialize. Many enterprises are apprehensive about security and placing stuff that amounts to their IP in public clouds. In such cases, CIOs could look at a hybrid approach --- placing non-critical information on the public cloud and critical information on a private cloud. The challenge here is that many enterprise applications need to work with both types of information (public and private). The good news however, is that interesting models have been developed for applications to function seamlessly with such hybrid approach transcending boundaries of corporate firewalls.

In the case of Unix to Linux Migrations, CIOs need to ask themselves tough questions like how the organization will ultimately benefit from this migration, and more importantly how fast will they get their ROI. While organizations swear by traditional RISC based UNIX systems because of their reliability, the good news is that the Linux platform is also ready to run mission critical business applications with significant strides in clustering and failover technologies. In fact many organizations run Linux on environments that have 99.999% uptime requirements.

Migrating to Windows 7 will help organizations improve productivity, connectivity and enhance security. Keep in mind the following during migrations: make sure you assess and maintain inventories, rationalize desktop networks and get rid of obsolete applications, categorize applications based on target deployment methods, and ensure you choose the right imaging target.

About the author- Yogesh Devi leads the UNIX-to-Linux-Migration Center of Excellence for Dell Services. Over the past 22 years, he has spent much time migrating UNIX applications to Linux.