With a beeline to hire the best among cloud hosting providers, India is witnessing a transformation of sorts in the Information Technology space. 

This should not be surprising given that in the market for cloud hosting India is having vendors as good as the best anywhere else on the globe.

But migration to the cloud environment is not an easy task for a broad assortment of companies operating with decades of legacy IT infrastructure. 

The burden of legacy systems is one of the toughest challenges companies have to face if at all they decide to move to cloud.
 
The top concerns for CIOs include security, vendor lock-in and Stealth IT. 

As one IT manager puts it, “We already own huge assets that we can still leverage, and changing is a new ballgame altogether”. 

But cloud is here to stay. It is for this reason there is good scope for cloud hosting providers, India has in the IT market. 

Today, we are witnessing CIOs taking pragmatic approach to cloud computing. They are selectively inducting SaaS applications, and moving infrastructure resources to IaaS environments.  

Nearly every player in the IT space is doing some form of cloud computing these days. 

Cloud has engulfed our lives. On smartphones we open our emails online, watch streaming videos and listen to music and auto save our favorite photos on our online accounts. All this is possible because of cloud. 

Cloud computing is inevitable. Smart companies migrating to cloud are not doing it just for the sake of price competitiveness. 

It is business agility that is driving companies to the cloud. In fact, many entrepreneurs have now realized that cloud computing is offering them intangible benefits like:

- Simplified in-house operations
- Better delivery of internal resources
- Creating newer ways for employees to operate and connect and collaborate. 
- Enhanced ability to analyze and act on data. 

In fact, it is the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that are showing extraordinary enthusiasm to move to cloud.  Most of the IT savvy SMEs are  using some cloud based applications, and exploit the benefits of online banking and social media. 

With plenty of expectations from cloud hosting providers, India is undergoing a new wave in the technology arena.

Organizations are embracing cloud with the hope that they will achieve higher performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.

But as all CIOs know, planning for a cloud migration requires careful thought, planning and consideration. Clouds are fraught with unknown risks, and therefore to avoid disastrous  events, a robust migration strategy has to be put in place. 

Here is what some smart IT professionals do. Before migrating, they evaluate applications and try to understand their business objectives in the cloud. Will the cloud environment support testing and development of applications?  

Another important factor to consider is how to plug the operating experience gap. The in-house team must have the skills to manage the application in the cloud set up. 

The bottom line is migrating to cloud is not as hard as it seems.  With proper planning and forethought, cloud computing can be made a powerful tool in business.