A prescriptive approach and framework
for a successful cloud migration.
In working with many clients across hundreds of projects, we continually hear
similar themes around large scale migration efforts. Here are the areas where
our clients most commonly struggle:
Scale and Velocity Requirements for Migrating Large Numbers of Applications -
Most organizations take months to create future state application deployment
architectures, and then migrate a single application. When an enterprise has
hundreds of applications to migrate, this challenges the viability of migration.
Lack of Visibility into Complexities and Dependencies - If you don’t have vis-
ibility into an application stack, you can’t migrate it. Whether this is due to
poor documentation, legacy or acquired assets, or decentralized deployment
practices, it is common for organizations to lack visibility into application com-
ponents, configurations and dependencies. Even though an enterprise may
have a list of all assets and their details within a CMDB, how do you validate
those assets, their architecture patterns and dependencies, to determine
which assets must move, and whether they are compatible with the target
cloud platform?
Suitability of a Migration Approach - How do you determine the specific
migration approach for an application (Rehost, Replatform, Refactor), and
which applications can leverage cloud-native components?
Migration Sequencing and Execution - How do you determine and account for
the right sequencing and configuration changes for the various dependencies,
and how do you account for the configuration changes required during the
execution phase? Making a configuration change can take only a few minutes,
but making the change out of sequence, or missing a change, can result in
many hours or even days of troubleshooting.
Migrating Mission Critical Applications with Zero Downtime - Most enter-
prises have mission critical applications that must be up 24x7, with large data
sets and databases constantly updated with multiple upstream and down-
stream integration points. Databases are especially difficult to move, and if
moved incorrectly, these assets can have a profound impact on the
organization.
Let’s look at the six key enablers that must be in place for any migration project
to succeed.
SPRING 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 17