Moving to the public cloud is a complex and time-consuming endeavor. A recent survey published by 2nd Watch found that nearly half of IT Directors felt that migrating to the cloud took more time and was more costly than they expected. Deciding how and when to transition your mission-critical applications to this new architecture is essential to optimizing cost and enhancing business agility.
When working with large enterprises on their cloud transformations, 2nd Watch has experienced first-hand how important assessment and planning are to achieving the benefits of cloud, including increased speed and business agility while reducing operational costs.
Companies moving to Google Cloud expect to realize these benefits quickly, but will suffer the same fate as many IT Directors if they don’t complete a full assessment covering the following phases:
- Application Assessment
- Application Categorization
- Technology Assessment
- Cost Assessment
- Organizational Assessment
Application Assessment
This area includes in-depth discovery surrounding your applications and is typically done in both interview format and using automated application discovery tools like StratoZone or CloudPhysics. During this assessment, teams take note of their dependencies between applications and components as well as any licensing and compliance requirements.
Application Categorization
Once you complete the assessment of each application, it’s time to determine the best method for migration. There are 7 methods that could be employed:
- Rehost: Applications that will be migrated as-is without infrastructure or application refactoring are known as Rehost migrations. Changes are limited to configuration only. This method is typically considered a lift-and-shift migration.
- Re-platform:This method refers to applications that undergo minor modernization to leverage core cloud-native capabilities. This may include minor code changes, upgrading platforms, or adopting managed services to better take advantage of a cloud feature. This may also include actions such as upgrading the operating system or database or reinstalling the application on the target cloud environment. In this case, storage migration will be needed but without any conversion.
- Refactor:Also known as rearchitect, this method focuses on modernizing portions of the application to leverage cloud-native technologies such as autoscaling, immutable infrastructure, serverless functions, or containerization. This may include rewriting the application code.
- Rewrite:This method is for applications that are being re-written from scratch or are greenfield projects. This often means the application is not moving to cloud and it is rewritten as microservices and deployed to cloud when complete. Sometimes this method is more cost effective over time, although the upfront work effort can be substantial.
- Retire:Retire refers to applications that have been retired or will be retired soon, meaning they will be turned off and removed. They may either be re-written or retired completely. This may include servers running an unsupported operating system, servers running that are no-longer needed, and/or servers that are turned off for disaster recovery and are unused.
- Retain:The Retain option is for workloads that will remain in the co-location facility or on-premises datacenter. These applications may run on legacy infrastructure until the end-of-life or move to another co-location facility.
- Repurchase: Conversion to a SaaS-based offering to replace existing in-house or 3rd party applications. Instead of migrating the application to the cloud, in this situation you’ll instead convert your existing business process and data to a new, 3rd party application operated as software as a service (SaaS) application. (For example, moving from on premise CRM to SalesForce.com).
Some applications may need different tiers to be addressed with different migration paths. For example, the Web tier may be rehosted, the application tier may be refactored, and the database tier may be re-platformed. In this case, multiple migration methods may be applied to a given application to best support its migration to the cloud.
Technology Assessment
Understanding your applications is only one part of the puzzle. The technology you use now will need to evolve to include Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), and Configuration Management. In addition, understanding how your existing security and compliance tooling will work in the new environment is key to ensuring your success. Areas like network design, storage and database needs, and authentication should be assessed to ensure proper cloud architecture. Last but not least, ensure you are looking into your current business continuity plans and how those may have to change to support the cloud.
Cost Assessment
Many companies center their move to the cloud around cost, but if you only work on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), you’ll miss the opportunity to save. Optimizing resources and creating a cost spending plan up front will help your finance team better understand the upfront and ongoing cloud investment. With Google Cloud, you can leverage Automated Rightsizing and Sustained Use Discounts to save, on average, 60% relative to what you’d pay on other clouds.
Organizational Assessment
Last but not least, understanding how your team will need to upskill or reskill to support cloud is essential to your success. Take the time to assess your teams’ skills and put together an education plan that will support their development. Upskilling and reskilling are both a smaller investment and quicker return on investment than hiring and training new employees.
Your team understands how your business works, and by providing them with the opportunity to learn how to marry their existing skills with cloud technologies will shortcut the skills and knowledge gap when moving to the cloud.
Yes, this process of assessment is not only comprehensive, but it can be complex, taking valuable time away from your migration efforts. The 2nd Watch Cloud Modernization Readiness Assessment (CMRA) covers all of these areas, helping you evaluate your company’s IT estate to determine application fitness and optimal migration methodology for your workloads and team.
If you’re interested in working with our certified cloud engineers and architects to analyze and assess your workloads, tools, and team, schedule some time with us today.
-Chris Garvey, EVP of Product
