In your cloud transformation journey, whether you’re thinking of lifting and shifting your legacy applications or rearchitecting for the cloud, application modernization is no easy process. As you look at your inventory of assets that must be moved to the cloud, there are several factors influencing the decision and final destination of each asset.
Business Drivers
The first and overarching influencers that must be addressed and continuously adhered to are the business drivers. The business drivers ultimately define what the return on investment will be, and only when the solution fulfills the requirements of the business drivers will the modernization effort will be considered a success.
Understanding Why
After the business drivers, you must understand why you should move to the cloud in general (mandate, shift CapEx to OpEx, elasticity, scalability, etc.), and why you should move an asset in particular (while considering if it’s a viable candidate for the cloud).
Should I move every asset?
Even with a mandate, not all assets make sense to move. You could have an asset that’s near end-of-life, isn’t utilized often, out of compliance, or the database could be too large for a migration.
For the assets that do make sense to move, understanding why it needs to be moved, its dependencies, and its operational requirements all help to determine the right strategy for its migration.
What we do as a company is help organizations map key business drivers to a strategy and tactical direction, which then ensures success as defined by stakeholders.
For each of the applications, we classify the type of asset, suggest which migration strategy would be the best fit, and then define what that migration strategy would look like.
Migration Strategy
A few factors that come into play when choosing a certain migration strategy are ROI, operational complexity, security, and cloud-native re-architecture (in the case of in-house built applications).
Below are some examples of different application types and the migration strategy for each:
From there, solutions can include containerization, virtual-machine migration, repurchasing cloud-based solutions, and third-party tools. These tools help with everything from monitoring, to deployment adds, to the vast complexity of the problem. The landscape of tools and solutions that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is almost dizzying and overwhelming.
Fortunately, we can help distill that information down to what is required for those specific workloads and as an overall strategy for your inventory, base needs, and capabilities.
If you have any questions along the way or are having a hard time modernizing your applications to hit your performance goals, use or contact us form to speak with our team.