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The growth of cloud-based application (SaaS (News - Alert)) and infrastructure (PaaS and IaaS) services has transformed the traditional software business models.

Infrastructure-as-a- Service (IaaS) is a standardized, highly automated offering where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking  capabilities, are owned and hosted by a service provider and offered to customers on demand. 

The advantage of IaaS is that customers can self-provision the infrastructure using a Web-based graphical user interface (GUI) that serves as an IT operations management console for the overall environment.

To help businesses simplify migration to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), RISC Networks (News - Alert), a global business technology analytics firm, announced the launch of the industry’s first cloud readiness analytic platform for IaaS environments.

Says Jeremy Littlejohn, CEO and chief analyst, “The problem with most cloud readiness assessments today is that they are manual engagements and frankly, sales tools to guide the customer into buying the IaaS vendors solution.”

Today business leaders are looking for more than what the manual engagements or self-assessment tools are providing, Littlejohn added. “Our Cloud Readiness Analytics gives IT leaders the opportunity to take control of the cloud process for their organization.”

The service gives companies the data they need to make educated decisions around the planning, execution and validation of a cloud IaaS migration, RISC Networks said. It provides businesses with the information needed to successfully size, scale, price, deploy and validate IaaS solutions based on their current infrastructure.

Gartner (News - Alert), in its 2013 Cloud IaaS Magic Quadrant, cautioned IT leaders about the issues associated with migrating to cloud services.

For example, in its August Magic Quadrant, Gartner cautioned about Amazon Web Services’ (News - Alert) (AWS) multiple generations of compute instances. The report said, “Each of these represents different levels of performance, and you must take this into account when choosing what instance type to use, and determine which offers the lowest cost for your particular workload.”

Gartner further said, “When comparing AWS’s performance with that of other providers, ensure that you are making an accurate, normalized comparison; do not equate an AWS EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) with a modern physical core.”

RISC Networks’ Cloud Readiness analysis is particularly helpful in this scenario. It includes Cloud Workload and Cost worksheet which detail the major I/O requirements of the companies environments and predicts what IaaS components companies would need from various cloud providers, as well as outlining the runtime cost for those components.