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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.

Image removed.

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

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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.

Image removed.

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

Cloud migration is a highly strategic decision that involves leadership sponsorship, business justifications for moving to the cloud, and a clear understanding of expected value. Lack of this alignment can be the reigning cause of cost and budget overruns and why almost half of the migration efforts underway today will fail in the next three years ...

One of the most misunderstood culprits of poor application performance is packet loss. Even minimal packet loss can cripple the throughput of a high-speed connection, making enterprise applications sluggish and frustrating for remote employee ... So, what's going wrong? And why does adding more bandwidth fail to fix the issue? ...

Image
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Industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025. Part 4 covers advancements in AI technology ...

Industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025. Part 3 covers AI's impact on employees and their roles ...

Industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025. Part 2 covers the challenges presented by AI, as well as solutions to those problems ...

In the final part of APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025 ...

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

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