Also, by their very nature, they tend to have been around for a while. They tend to run on legacy hardware, which can make the whole process more challenging.

Look to Your Disaster Recovery Plan First

As a first step, before even considering cloud providers, McLellan recommends CIOs take a look at their disaster recovery plan for the application in question.

"When was the last time you exercised your disaster recovery plan? When did you last test it? The easiest way to migrate your application is to treat it as if it were a disaster recovery exercise," McLellan says. "If you don't have a disaster recovery plan for that particular application, it's going to be very hard to migrate because no one has really thought about how to recover it."

He also notes that applications designed with disaster recovery in mind lend themselves to straightforward migrations, while applications that had disaster recovery plans bolted on after the fact generally lead to much more complex and time-consuming migrations.