o migrate IT applications to the cloud. The size and complexity of this effort is one of the largest in the world. Migrating IT applica- tions to a cloud infrastructure includes refactoring these applications to run natively on the cloud. There are significant savings in retiring legacy infrastructure and moving to an automated cloud. In addition, the agility provided by the cloud to scale in and scale out, chain services and use robust APIs facilitates flexibility. The migration to a cloud architecture meets the following high-level objectives: Increase utilization of IT assets by optimizing cloud footprint Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by reducing compute cores by greater than 50% through the virtualization of assets, and utilizing open source technologies and shared infrastructure and being able to oversubscribe CPU capacity Increase flexibility and improve the IT group's ability to respond to business demand by creating hardware and software independence * It is possible to have a truly hitless operation by mirroring TCP/BGP states across the active and standby forwarding VNF instances. However, this will make the VNF design even more complex. Also TCP state mirroring in an expensive process. Network Functions Virtualization Software and tool standardization for those migrated applications driving lower costs and consistency among application teams IT applications that provide the best return on investment are identified as the top candidates for migration to the cloud. Each application is analyzed to understand its needs based on the current location, system requirements, and changes required to migrate to standard operating environments like Linux. Some applications cannot be moved to the cloud, at least initially, based on three main reasons: Database requirements for high I/O, Oracle RAC, or Veritas Clustering (requires capabil- ity enablement) Software requirements from vendors that do not provide virtualized options (requires ven- dors to change) Networking requirements for low latency performanc