Cloud Migration: A Case Study of Migrating an Enterprise IT System to IaaS

TL;DR

This case study examines the migration of an oil & gas enterprise IT system to Amazon EC2, highlighting cost savings and support call reductions, while emphasizing organizational risks and stakeholder considerations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed case analysis of cloud migration in a specific industry, emphasizing organizational impacts beyond technical and financial factors.

Findings

37% cost reduction over 5 years on EC2

Potential 21% reduction in support calls

Significant organizational risks identified

Abstract

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.