Prioritizing Enterprise Applications for Migration to Cloud

To improve productivity, agility, cost efficiency and scores of organizations are now in the process of migration to cloud on a massive scale. The reduction in the cost of infrastructure and support is probably the biggest driver to cloud technology as it results in significant savings in the long run. It also allows enterprises to grow or shrink infrastructure resources dynamically according to demand. Besides the advantages of scalability and elasticity, cloud computing also brings in the benefits of flexibility and agility.

There could be more things, which are driving the decision of the migration to cloud, including a needed IT transformation to be up-to-date with technology and support future goals of the organization.

Moving away from on-premises virtual machines, which have been there from many years and have been supported by many to accommodate plenty of applications, is not going to be an easy task unless one understands the need of the migration and is familiar with the applications.

To identify where an enterprise should put its money on, look for those applications which are:

• Under or over utilizing the infrastructure
• Mission critical and has high importance or impact (Requires 24x7 up time)
• In immediate need of scaling up due to a lot of traffic

An enterprise should prepare a list of all the applications that are there on the on-premises virtual machines and then try to answer these questions:

• What are the architectures of these applications?
• Do you need a data security and compliance assessment?
• What are the risks involved with each one of them?
• Who are the users -- internal, partner/retail network, customers, etc.?
• Are there any dependencies? What are those?
• Which licenses are being used and what are the agreements for them?

After figuring out the answers to all these questions, an enterprise can plan and pick its first set of applications that needs to be migrated to the cloud. Check whether such applications have:

• A complex, moderate or simple architecture and coupling
• Contains confidential, internal and public data
• High, medium or low at risk and impact
• Has no high licensing restrictions

It is crucial to re-think and re-draw the applications which shall be planned as the first set for migration. It is recommended that organizations should pick an application which has simple and low complexity architecture, no low data compliance requirements, and low risk but medium to high business impact. This will help the team to understand cloud platform and services, the learning experience and the success will be a confidence booster for future migrations.

Migration to cloud requires support not just from the management and IT but all other stakeholders.

By, Amit Kanoongo, Delivery Director, ATCS