Why Sun's New Cloud CTO Is Targeting Migration of Legacy Apps First

Moving applications from one data center today "to your new data center you just built" can be a thorny issue, Tucker said.

"Cloud computing doesn't make any of those things go away," he said. "There will be this continued migration of legacy apps that are being replaced by newer apps—the functionality, that is. Instead of using your old HR [human resources] system, for example, you'll use a new SAAS-type HR application. Apps that were built in the last five or 10 years—more the internal Web applications—can be moved over very quickly to a cloud."

Moving a data center that's loaded with applications from the 1990s and early 2000s doesn't require wholesale movement of everything all at once, Tucker said.

"It's not that kind of a switch. It's more of an evolution of what's going on in the data center and an evolution of the development of more interesting services on the Internet that are now finding applicability back in the enterprise," Tucker said.

Salesforce.com, Google Apps, and new online HR applications are current examples of these "more interesting" services, he said. "A lot of these have already moved into the cloud, and they are now becoming part of the IT organization that we have to manage and administrate.

"The question really isn't, 'Will legacy applications have to move?' I think some will, and some won't. The real question is, 'How does an IT organization evolve?' This will mean bringing in more and more cloud services," Tucker said. "The goal is to move all your end users forward at the same time."