IT leaders turn an eye toward the cloud when they’re looking to solve elasticity and scalability issues. One of the key differentiators of the cloud as compared to traditional infrastructure is that it’s inherently flexible.

Migrating workloads, especially complex, multi-tiered applications, can be a harrowing process. Undertaking the migration without a solid understanding of the interdependencies of applications and the exact resource requirements means almost certain failure. In today’s world, it’s understandable that failures can, do, and will happen; what’s not acceptable today is downtime. Cutovers of migrations need to be instant, or an hour at most.