Moving apps to cloud : Are you ready ?

Cloud! Cloud! Cloud! So much has been written and talked about it, that, people have started thinking whether it is for real or hype? But the fact is that cloud has passed phase of “inflated expectations” and it is in for real. It is growing at enormous speed. Benefits are huge whether it elasticity & scalability or resiliency.

For me, the biggest drivers are reduction in costs, shift from Cap-ex to Op-ex and agility it brings to enterprises in terms of time to market and ability to change. It is driving more and more organisations to move to the cloud. Application migration to the cloud is, perhaps, the most important thing that organization will be doing in next 4 to 5 or may be 10 years.

So, how do we do it? Where do we start? Which cloud provider we should go for? Let’s try to address these concerns.

Perhaps, the biggest factors that affect application migration are security, compliance and enabling technology.

We need to understand what security & compliance requirements are and check whether CSP can meet those security requirements. However, in the real world, it will be a rare situation where CSP will not be able to provide type of security required by the application. In most cases, it will not only be comparable but may be superior than that is provided in the traditional systems.

Then, we need to understand what is the enabling technology behind that application. For eg, we may not be able to move program written in old language like COBOL as we may not be able to find a cloud platform supporting this.

And, this is okay! We need to understand that we cannot migrate every application to the cloud. On an average, there are more than 50 percent of applications in organizations that are either not cloud ready or cannot be moved to the cloud due to various reasons. Reasons could be anything like, audit. If there is a compliance requirement that you need to conduct a physical audit, then you cannot move the application as CSP will not allow physical access to their datacenters.

Mid- to Big organizations can have up to 3000 to 5000 application workloads and therefore, it, absolutely, makes sense that we conduct a detailed application portfolio assessment as part of our total cloud migration strategy.

We need to asses each application to categorise and prioritise them for application migration program. As I mentioned earlier that security, compliance & enabling technology are biggest factors, some additional criteria that we can look at are:

1. Database coupling – When we refer to term application workload, it usually, includes source code and the database associated with it. It is very difficult to move apps which are tightly coupled with databases whereas loose coupled apps will be better candidate for migration.
2. Documentation and readiness – It may look irrelevant but plays a very important role. You cannot just forklift every application and move to cloud. It is very tough to move applications that does not have documentation or IT does not have full knowledge of its architecture and functionalities.
3. Recently developed and use of modern technology – This, more or less, maps to enablement technology used because most CSP provide platforms and technologies that are in common use and recently developed. So, cloud may not be a good option for legacy systems.

Next, comes the categorization based on the above criteria. It is very important that each application is placed in one of the following groups. Groups are divided by famous R’s of cloud migration:

1. Re-host – Easiest and represent apps that can be forklifted and move to the cloud. Minimal efforts required.
2. Re-platform – Apps which can be moved to a better solution in cloud. Typically, it means replacing your old software with a SaaS solution.
3. Refactor – Significant changes are required in this type of apps before they can be tailored fit to cloud.
4. Re-use – Apps that can be decomposed and its parts or services can be used in proposed cloud solution.
5. Retain – Apps that cannot be moved to cloud and retained by the enterprise.
6. Retire – Apps which are of no use and therefore can be disposed of by the enterprise.

In fact, this whole process help us to audit our applications and clean stuff which are not required. Once, this process is complete, we are in a better position to migrate applications to cloud and can prioritise our work.

One last thing, I want to touch before ending this, is selection of service provider. There are lot and lot of providers available out there and it is also true that market is currently dominated by big players like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Platform, IBM etc.

So, we need to be very careful while choosing the right vendor for us. We need to look at our business requirements, security & governance requirements and then compare the vendors in market. Our business requirement should map to the service provider and not the other way around, like, we select the CSP and then try to fit in our business requirements in that.

So, to round up, yes, cloud computing is an exciting shift in a way we deal with IT and it is here to stay. At some point of time, we must jump into its bandwagon to take full advantage of this technological advancement. But at the same time, we need to be careful and design effective strategies and cloud adoption programs.

(Note: Above article covers relevant topics related to application migration and does not discuss whole cloud migration strategy or cloud adoption program which may include areas like security & governance, DevOps and so on)