This article originally appeared in the Dec. 2011 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY.

Much like moving into a new home or office, moving applications into the cloud is an exciting time. While the actual move is daunting, it's also an excellent time to discover some hidden treasures. It's a great time to take an inventory of what you have and decide what to throw away and what to put to better use. 

As end users consider moving their applications into a virtual environment the excitement is often centered around lower costs and greater flexibility. And while there is still much debate on the cost savings associated with the cloud, there are some nice hidden benefits that end users can realize through the process.

Virtualization is a great opportunity to take an inventory of your critical business processes. Your IT department will need to track how applications are used, and the frequency of access. This can have the hidden benefit of letting them know which apps can be decommissioned to save costs. Conversely, deciding what programs to virtualize will help you determine which ones have high priority. For example, storage is traditionally poorly utilized with many isolated pools of storage each sized for maximum capacity. A cloud storage optimization plan can eliminate the waste and highlight potential savings.  

How standardized are your processes? Business processes that have been standardized are ideal for the cloud. As companies look at each of their business processes it becomes clear which ones have standards in place. For example, by standardizing service offerings, you can speed time to market and improve asset utilization. You may also discover new service revenue streams that did not exist before.

Finally, moving applications to the cloud can help the disaster recovery plan. As you prepare certain business applications to move to the cloud it's a perfect time to evaluate the disaster recovery strategy more broadly. For example, how will the organization be notified in the event of an outage that affects the cloud provider? 

So what's the final score?

Moving apps into a cloud virtual environment is a smart move, because it improves performance and cuts costs. An even smarter move is to look for hidden benefits in business processes and strategy as you move to the cloud that can yield even great improvements to the bottom line.