In our latest HOSTING 360 Cloud Podcast, we caught up with Mike McCracken, Senior Director of Professional Services. In addition to managing the HOSTING team of cloud solution consultants, Mike spends much of his time advising clients to leverage different cloud technologies to gain business advantages. We sat down with Mike to ask about the latest cloud computing trends and technologies. You can listen to the entire podcast on-demand. In the meantime, we’ve included some highlights below.

Just a few short years ago, companies learned about the cloud by seeing charges on their Amazon invoices. Truth be told, “Shadow IT” groups within a company were the first to adopt cloud computing solutions. For example, a marketing department would set up their own cloud solution to store finished deliverables. Most of the time these cloud environments were outside the company’s firewall and lacked the same security and compliance measures than what their IT teams would implement.

Fast forward a few years, and cloud use is becoming more widespread. Initially the cloud was relegated to low-risk test/dev or “sandbox” workloads. Today, organizations are moving both edge applications (i.e., e-commerce sites or company websites) as well as core applications containing sensitive data to the cloud. They are also taking advantage of the cloud’s scalability. Rather than purchase additional servers or virtual machines, companies are leveraging the cloud for seasonal workloads where they need to scale resources quickly for events such as Tax Day, Black Friday, etc.

Mike emphasizes that while cloud migrations are a team effort between the customer and their cloud service provider (CSP), some things are best left to the experts.

“Cloud migrations are complex,” Mike notes. “Everyone comes into it thinking, ‘I understand my server or application’ but they’re not doing migrations on a day-to-day basis.”

Mike compares cloud migrations to working on your car. You may know how to change the oil in it, but doing a complete engine rebuild is probably outside your expertise.

So what can companies do to help ensure a successful migration? Mike offers a few tips:

In 2010, personal computers (PCs) were still the primary vehicle for people to work, shop and access information over the Internet. IDC predicts that by 2015, 90% of devices shipped will be smartphones and tablets versus 10% for PCs. The explosion of mobile devices has