Planning to Move to the Cloud?

Cloud technologies have matured to a point where businesses should seriously consider migrating their physical infrastructure to the cloud. Whether you are a startup, small, medium or large business, you can significantly reduce your infrastructure costs by migrating your apps and data to the cloud.

While there is a multitude of cloud computing vendors in the market today, the offering from Amazon is the most flexible and mature. Amazon's cloud offering comes under the Amazon Web Services umbrella and consists of EC2 virtual machines, EBS storage volumes that can be attached to EC2 instances and the S3 cloud storage.

Top reasons to move to the cloud / Amazon EC2:

No need to invest in physical assets like servers and networking equipment. You save big on upfront capital costs.
More efficient capacity utilization - Many data centers operate only at a fraction of their capacity. If you are running your own infrastructure, you have to plan and buy hardware resources for the peak load, which may happen only during certain days or hours of the week or after you send out an email campaign. Thus, your hardware is vastly underutilized during other times. The way to improve capacity utilization is through virtualization, which is what cloud computing services provide.
Availability - Amazon EC2 has an SLA commitment of 99.95% for each region (US and Europe). The EC2 instances can be placed in different locations, thereby providing protection against any single instance crashing.
Scalability - This is one of the most important advantages of going to the cloud. If you need more capacity, you can provision it in a matter of minutes. You can start new EC2 instances to take on the extra load. Auto-scaling option is also available. Compare that to the process of scaling a physical infrastructure, where the process could take days if not weeks.
Cost - An EC2 small instance will cost you approximately $75 per month assuming 30 GB outbound traffic. A small instance is equivalent to a single core 32-bit machine with 1.7 GB of memory and 160 GB of instance storage. If you need a dedicated server with similar capacity, reliability and availability, you will be paying more than $120 per month.
Monitoring Tools - Amazon CloudWatch allows you to monitor and optimize resource utilization.

QBurst can work with you to assess your current IT infrastructure and come up with a plan to migrate it across. It does not matter whether you run Windows or a flavor of Linux. Similarly, your database could be MySQL, Oracle, Postgre or any other database. Your application could be in PHP, Perl, Java, .NET or any language / framework for that matter. In fact, any managed service can be migrated. For popular platforms, the migration would be easier simply because ready-made Amazon Machine Images (AMI) are available. Also, vendors like IBM are coming out with AMIs for their products and frameworks.