12 steps to evolve to Hybrid Cloud

Is the promise of Cloud still a bit foggy? Asks Ben Rossi in this article on Information Age. Perhaps. However, more often than not, it is not really the underlying technology that is at fault. The “promise” of Cloud is determined more by what you do before going to the Cloud than the actual act of doing so! Simple but powerful questions like “Why go to the Cloud?”, “What should go to the Cloud”, “When should the migration to Cloud happen” are all fair questions to ask. The questions might be the same but the answers could vary one enterprise to another.  A pragmatic individual in a global IT team recently made the point that the enabling technology might be “cool” but there is a lot of groundwork that needs to be done before kicking the tyres with this solution! How many steps you ask? Well, at least a dozen I would say! Here is my take on the Twelve Steps to go to the hybrid cloud. 

Step 1. Assess and represent Current State Landscape. Enterprises usually have a diverse landscape of applications and enabling infrastructure that have grown over the years. More often than not, the applications have persisted because of the data that they hold and provide access to. A clear enterprise-wide representation of the portfolio of applications at a level where it can be easily understood is a key first step. 

• Answers the question: What have we got to deal with?

Step 2. Identify and prioritize significant Business Functions. Applications and the supporting infrastructure usually enable various business functions being performed by the enterprise including those that are external facing and others that are more internal back-office applications. As time goes by, market forces, industry trends as well as mergers and acquisitions can change the significance of some of these business functions. The next step would be to prioritize the business functions that matter the most. Some business functions may not need to be performed anymore and could be rationalized or consolidated into others. 

• Answers the question: What should we really focus on?

Step 3. Determine enabling applications for these business functions. Significant business functions have their own pool of enabling applications. By consequence, these are the applications that need to be given more attention to in the context of the journey to the cloud.

• Answers the question: Which applications really matter?

Step 4. Rationalize Applications. The next step is to identify redundant functionality across applications and rationalize them down to a more manageable number. When doing so, some applications may have to be de-commissioned while others could merit a more state-of-the-art user-friendly interface. Then, there are those that simply have to be re-engineered from the drawing board. This is also a good time to revisit the original business requirements that the existing application was based on and revise them to cater to the needs of the newer generations of users. Here lies the irony: Some applications are better left alone where they are! Reality check!

• Answers the question: Which applications do really need to be modernized?

Step 5. Define Future State Architecture. By this time, the need for co-existence across a multitude of environments to host the different subsets of applications becomes more and more evident. This is the time to define the future state architecture factoring in the need for all the constituent environments as well as the applications within.

• Answers the question:What does my future state look like and when?

Step 6. Establish criteria migration to the cloud. Ask yourself the key business and technical drivers for migrating to the cloud. These drivers will provide the foundation for the specific criteria that can be used to determine the suitability of applications to go to the cloud. 

• Answers the question: How will I know which applications need to go to the cloud?

Step 7. Identify applications that remain on-premise, private or public cloud. Exercising the criteria on the portfolio of applications will also get into details like the cloud deployment model as well as the need for applications to remain on-premise in the traditional bare metal or virtualized environments. Hence Hybrid Cloud!  

• Answers the question: What are the specific cloud environments that applications will be deployed on?

Step 8. Standardize on Software Development, Deployment and Management Platform. While, on the one hand, enterprises are challenged with the continuous proliferation of applications, technologies, tools and platforms, Cloud serves as a terrific catalyst for going back to the basics from multiple perspectives. To streamline the experience of the internal developer as well as the operations team and therefore, the external customer, standardization of the environment and tooling platform is a critical step -- possibly the most important one of them all!

• Answers the question: What are the core sets of tools and platforms that need to be sustained going forward?

Step 9. Refine Enterprise Integration Strategy. The migration to the cloud does not take away the need for connecting back to the historical data that could still be resident within the systems of record. Here again, cloud is a great catalyst for reviewing and refining the integration strategy while modernizing integration styles.

• Answers the question: How do we integrate the landscape of applications across the extended enterprise?

Step 10. Identify Integration Patterns. With the advent of a multitude of data sources including IoT, sensors as well as the need for structured and unstructured data, there is a diverse array of integration patterns that have emerged over the years. This step is about identifying the integration patterns that apply in the context of your enterprise.

• Answers the question: What are the most commonly used integration patterns?

Step 11. Define roadmap for migrating solutions. This is the step where business and IT needs to come together to identify the time frame for migrating the solutions that matter to the appropriate target environments. 

• Answers the question: When do we migrate to the cloud?

Step 12. Execute the migration plan. This final step is to follow through on the roadmap defined while monitoring the business and technical KPIs through the migration process. This is very important because Cloud Computing ROI can be extremely elusive! 

• Answers the question: What did we get out of migrating to the cloud? And while doing so, it would not hurt to factor in the 9 key phrases of DevOps!

There you have it. 

Evolution to the cloud is a long journey depending upon the size and complexity of the landscape of applications. I am sure there are many more considerations to be factored in. What I have called out here is some of the critical steps that must be taken in advance to justify the continuous migration.

And these steps also answer 12 of the most frequently asked questions in this context.

What say you? Do you have a 13th step?

Please let me know.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NadhanEG