Source-linked AI summary
Cloud Migration: A Case Study of Migrating an Enterprise IT System to IaaS
Ali Khajeh-Hosseini, David Greenwood, Ian Sommerville
TL;DR
The paper examines limited evidence on migrating existing enterprise systems and on the organizational implications of cloud adoption. It uses a stakeholder-focused case study of migration to Amazon EC2, finding lower projected infrastructure costs and fewer potentially affected support calls alongside significant organizational risks. The findings support evaluating cloud migration beyond financial and technical benefits.
Problem
Few case studies address migration of existing IT systems, and little research examines cloud computing’s enterprise and organizational implications.
Method
The study combines cost comparison, support-call analysis, and six semi-structured stakeholder interviews analyzed through stakeholder impact analysis.
Results
37% less over 5 years was the projected infrastructure cost on Amazon EC2, while cloud computing could potentially eliminate 21% of support calls.
Takeaways & Limitations
Enterprise decision-makers should consider organizational implications and stakeholder impacts alongside cloud computing’s financial and technical benefits.
Takeaways & Limitations
Migration risks included dependence on third parties that could affect customer satisfaction and overall service quality.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
This case study illustrates the potential benefits and risks associated with the migration of an IT system in the oil & gas industry from an in-house data center to Amazon EC2 from a broad variety of stakeholder perspectives across the enterprise, thus transcending the typical, yet narrow, financial and technical analysis offered by providers. Our results show that the system infrastructure in the case study would have cost 37% less over 5 years on EC2, and using cloud computing could have potentially eliminated 21% of the support calls for this system. These findings seem significant enough to call for a migration of the system to the cloud but our stakeholder impact analysis revealed that there are significant risks associated with this. Whilst the benefits of using the cloud are attractive, we argue that it is important that enterprise decision-makers consider the overall organizational implications of the changes brought about with cloud computing to avoid implementing local optimizations at the cost of organization-wide performance.
1. Introduction
Enterprises are adopting cloud services for promised financial and technical benefits, but existing evidence gives limited attention to migrating established systems and the organizational implications. This paper addresses that gap through a stakeholder-focused case study of migration to Amazon EC2.
- Enterprise decision-makers should consider organizational implications alongside cloud computing’s advertised financial and technical advantages.
- Few case studies examine migrating existing IT systems to the cloud, and little research addresses enterprise or organizational implications.
- The paper studies migration from an in-house data center to Amazon EC2, focusing on financial and socio-technical enterprise issues.
- The case study examines potential migration benefits and risks from project, technical, support, and business-development stakeholders’ perspectives.
2. Background
The paper situates a proposed migration of an offshore data-acquisition system from an in-house data center to Amazon EC2 within broader cloud benefits, risks, and organizational change. It emphasizes that enterprise cloud adoption requires attention beyond technology and cost.
- 2.1. Proposed Migration Project: The migration use-case considers deploying a quality-monitoring and data-acquisition system for offshore operations on Amazon EC2.
- 2.1. Proposed Migration Project: The existing system used database and application servers, tape backups, network equipment, and remote desktop access over the internet.
- 2.1. Proposed Migration Project: Company B’s support department maintained the system in its data center, while the case study examined deploying and maintaining the same system in the cloud.
- 2.2. Related Work: Cloud computing changes how IT is provisioned and used, so enterprises must consider its benefits, risks, and organizational effects.
- 2.2. Related Work: Prior work identifies elasticity and reduced operational and maintenance costs as cloud benefits, while some cost frameworks remained conceptual or narrowly focused.
- 2.2. Related Work: The case study highlights organizational risks and stakeholder perceptions, an area described as underrepresented in prior enterprise cloud literature.
3. Methodology
The study combined documentary and operational data with stakeholder interviews to assess migration costs, support impacts, and organizational consequences. Interview transcripts were analyzed using stakeholder impact analysis.
- Fieldwork at Company B took place from May to July 2009 and began with collecting and studying system-related documents.
- Infrastructure costs were calculated from project reports and invoices, then compared with a similar setup on Amazon EC2.
- Support and maintenance records were manually reviewed to identify and analyze calls potentially affected by migration.
- Six semi-structured interviews were conducted after presenting employees with a migration poster, and transcripts were reviewed by two researchers.
- Stakeholder impact analysis identified changes in tasks and their consequences for stakeholders’ time, resources, capabilities, values, status, and satisfaction.
- The analysis also considered relational factors and whether stakeholders might perceive changes as procedurally or distributively unjust.
4.1. Infrastructure Costs
The infrastructure-cost analysis compared the existing data-center setup with AWS assumptions for equivalent compute, storage, transfer, and backup needs. The cloud option offered lower costs and avoided upfront infrastructure capital.
- Amazon EC2 could begin with two small instances and scale to large instances if performance proved unacceptable.
- AWS cost estimates assumed two Windows On-Demand instances running continuously in Europe, with specified transfer, storage, I/O, and snapshot requirements.
- Cloud infrastructure could help Company B bid for new projects without additional data-center space and offer clients a cheaper deployment alternative.
- 37% cheaper was the estimated five-year cost of deploying the system in the cloud using small and large server instances.
- Cloud deployment required no upfront infrastructure capital because users would be charged monthly.
4.2. Support and Maintenance
Cloud migration would change support and maintenance because the support department would lose full control of the infrastructure. Existing support calls were largely tied to backup and network problems.
- Cloud migration would reduce the support department’s control over system infrastructure.Current health checks include error logs, backup logs, server loads, and communication links.
- 38 support calls concerned database-server backups involving tapes, failed attempts, or loose cables.Remedies included erasing tapes, rebooting the tape drive, or rerunning backup scripts; some days lacked backups.
- 5 support calls concerned network problems, including router and accidentally unplugged power-cable issues.
4.3. Stakeholder Impact Analysis
Stakeholder analysis found that cloud migration offers benefits but also creates more identified risks than benefits across organizational areas. Perceptions varied by stakeholder function, with positive, neutral, and negative net-benefit assessments.
- Business development and junior IT support perceived a positive net benefit, while project and support management perceived zero net benefit.
- Technical managers and support engineers perceived a negative net benefit from the proposed cloud migration.
- Twelve specific benefits were identified, compared with eighteen specific risks associated with migration.
- The largest benefit sources involved managing income and outgoings differently, offering new products or services, improving job status, and removing tedious work.
- The largest risks involved potential deterioration in customer care and service quality, greater third-party dependence, less satisfying work, and increased workload.
4.4. Benefits
The case study identifies financial, operational, organizational, and staff-related benefits associated with adopting third-party cloud infrastructure instead of an in-house data center.
- Financial management: Cloud infrastructure can ease cash-flow management through minimal upfront costs, monthly billing, and reduced electricity-expenditure variability.These changes contrast with high hardware costs and significant energy outgoings in an in-house data center.
- Financial management: Cloud infrastructure can offer customers more flexible pricing and reduce the finance department’s administrative burden.Customers may receive more payment choices, or the infrastructure outsourcer may bill them directly.
- Staff benefits: Cloud migration may improve support staff’s status through strategic involvement, prestigious technology exposure, and sought-after cloud administration skills.Support managers may gain career progression and job satisfaction, while engineers develop industry-relevant experience.
- Staff benefits: Cloud infrastructure can shift routine hardware, network, and backup maintenance to the provider, allowing support engineers to focus on software support.The resulting work may be more satisfying and value-adding for support engineers.
- Staff benefits: The migration can create new challenges and support systems-support involvement for technical developers, sales staff, and marketing staff.Examples include regular system health checks and developing new product or service offerings.
- Staff development: Cloud migration offers support, sales, and marketing staff opportunities to develop skills in cloud administration, product creation, and product launching.The paper links these expanded skill sets and experiences with career progression.
- Organizational growth: Cloud scalability and cost effectiveness may enable sales and marketing staff to target previously inaccessible market segments.These properties may support new offerings, larger market share, and achievement of sales targets.
4.5. Risks
The migration creates organizational risks alongside its technical and financial benefits, especially through reduced control over infrastructure and changed work demands. These risks may affect service quality, customer care, job satisfaction, staffing, and long-term cost certainty.
- Customer care and service: Cloud-provider dependence may deteriorate service quality because support staff lose control over hardware and network issues.Migration can also require additional resources and temporarily slow task completion while staff develop cloud expertise.
- Customer care and service: External-provider cooperation may lengthen customer-query resolution, increasing response-time backlogs and follow-up work.Customer care staff may become dissatisfied when they cannot maintain existing service levels.
- Job satisfaction: Cloud migration risks lower job satisfaction when support work shifts from hands-on technical problem-solving to reporting and provider coordination.Sales, marketing, and customer-care staff may also experience dissatisfaction from unrealistic targets or altered service demands.
- Staffing and resources: IT support departments may face downsizing when cloud providers assume responsibility for hardware and network maintenance.This risk is greatest where those activities comprise most of the department’s existing work.
- Staffing and resources: Cloud migration may temporarily increase resource demands because staff need time to learn cloud-system tasks.The paper also identifies longer-term uncertainty from cloud-usage and data-transfer costs, plus reduced in-house expertise and provider dependence.
- Organizational implications: Organizational assessment should include service quality, customer care, governance, and third-party dependency rather than financial and technical analysis alone.The authors caution that financial considerations may not be the primary business concern in some cases.
5. Conclusion and Future Work
The case study finds substantial potential savings and support-call reductions from migrating infrastructure to Amazon EC2, but also identifies socio-technical risks and unquantified costs. It recommends stakeholder-focused assessment and further research to test the findings across settings.
- Conclusion: 37% lower infrastructure cost over 5 years and potentially 21% fewer support calls were estimated for Amazon EC2.The stakeholder analysis nevertheless identified risks involving customer satisfaction, service quality, job satisfaction, and long-term cost volatility.
- Conclusion: Stakeholder impact analysis identifies organizational risks that financial and technical evaluations alone may miss.The identified disadvantages include third-party control, changed work, and volatility in cloud-usage and data-transfer costs.
- Practical implications: Practitioners can adapt the generic benefits and risks into a monitored risk register for cloud-infrastructure migration projects.Enterprises may also perform stakeholder impact analysis in-house to develop a situation-specific understanding.
- Limitations: The cost analysis covered system infrastructure but did not quantify migration work, support-staff costs, or AWS Premium Support.Stakeholder impact analysis addressed these and other non-quantifiable consequences qualitatively.
- Future work: Whether financial benefits reach most end-users remains unclear when organizations outsource IT to system integrators.The paper identifies insufficient evidence about whether integrators have adequate financial incentives to adopt cloud infrastructure.
- Future work: Future work includes decision-support tools for estimating cloud-running costs, continued risk investigation, and additional case studies to confirm the results.The researchers are studying migrations of non-business-critical applications with Company C.