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Best Practices for Successful Cloud Migration for Applications - Part 1

Lev Lesokhin
CAST

It shouldn't come as a surprise that IT leaders are putting a lot of eggs in the cloud basket. By the end of 2020, an estimated 83% of enterprise workloads will be based in the cloud. Platform choices are evolving too, and firms are grappling with the choices, weighing the differences between commodity and custom offerings to fit their application and architectural mix. However, regardless of platform choice, some organizations expect they can dump applications into the cloud and walk away — taking a hands-off approach.


Many aren't doing the due diligence needed to properly assess and facilitate a move of applications to the cloud. This is according to the recent 2019 Cloud Migration Report which revealed half of IT leaders at banks, insurance and telecommunications companies do not conduct adequate risk assessments prior to moving apps over to the cloud. Essentially, they are going in blind and expecting everything to turn out ok. Spoiler alert: It doesn't.

The report shows 50% of businesses don't prioritize what applications need to be moved to the cloud and one third aren't analyzing them before migration. IT decision makers are relying on their "sixth sense" — a gut feeling that it's time, or it's the next logical step in a company's digital transformation journey. The application might be cloud ready too and that becomes reason alone. But it's not enough. Business demand is leading the decision and applications expected to fit into the cloud without prior consideration.

As a result, 40% of cloud migrations are falling short of expectations — failing to meet targets for cost, resiliency and planned user benefits.

Fewer than 35% of technology leaders use freely-available analysis tools. There is a systematic failure to assess the underlying application readiness for cloud migration with a deep analysis of software architecture.

IT teams need to adopt an analysis led approach to cloud migration — assessing both the qualitative business impact and objective composition of their application portfolio. This will make the front-end migration easier and simplify the back-end maintenance over time — if you are ready to begin with, you won't have to overcome serious obstacles later. One small change to an application has a domino effect on the rest of the code set, so when something big, like a cloud migration, takes place and an application isn't ready, the effects can be detrimental with outcomes such as IT outages and loss of business.

Read Best Practices for Successful Cloud Migration for Applications - Part 2, for three best practices for successful cloud migration for applications.

Lev Lesokhin is EVP of Strategy and Analytics at CAST

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

Best Practices for Successful Cloud Migration for Applications - Part 1

Lev Lesokhin
CAST

It shouldn't come as a surprise that IT leaders are putting a lot of eggs in the cloud basket. By the end of 2020, an estimated 83% of enterprise workloads will be based in the cloud. Platform choices are evolving too, and firms are grappling with the choices, weighing the differences between commodity and custom offerings to fit their application and architectural mix. However, regardless of platform choice, some organizations expect they can dump applications into the cloud and walk away — taking a hands-off approach.


Many aren't doing the due diligence needed to properly assess and facilitate a move of applications to the cloud. This is according to the recent 2019 Cloud Migration Report which revealed half of IT leaders at banks, insurance and telecommunications companies do not conduct adequate risk assessments prior to moving apps over to the cloud. Essentially, they are going in blind and expecting everything to turn out ok. Spoiler alert: It doesn't.

The report shows 50% of businesses don't prioritize what applications need to be moved to the cloud and one third aren't analyzing them before migration. IT decision makers are relying on their "sixth sense" — a gut feeling that it's time, or it's the next logical step in a company's digital transformation journey. The application might be cloud ready too and that becomes reason alone. But it's not enough. Business demand is leading the decision and applications expected to fit into the cloud without prior consideration.

As a result, 40% of cloud migrations are falling short of expectations — failing to meet targets for cost, resiliency and planned user benefits.

Fewer than 35% of technology leaders use freely-available analysis tools. There is a systematic failure to assess the underlying application readiness for cloud migration with a deep analysis of software architecture.

IT teams need to adopt an analysis led approach to cloud migration — assessing both the qualitative business impact and objective composition of their application portfolio. This will make the front-end migration easier and simplify the back-end maintenance over time — if you are ready to begin with, you won't have to overcome serious obstacles later. One small change to an application has a domino effect on the rest of the code set, so when something big, like a cloud migration, takes place and an application isn't ready, the effects can be detrimental with outcomes such as IT outages and loss of business.

Read Best Practices for Successful Cloud Migration for Applications - Part 2, for three best practices for successful cloud migration for applications.

Lev Lesokhin is EVP of Strategy and Analytics at CAST

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...