Across industries , our experience points to an average TCO savings of around 40 % year-over-year , and the primary way to achieve this goal is through an application migration factory approach .
To accomplish a solid reduction in TCO requires a significant migration of application workloads to the cloud .
In our prior nine best practices , we have been preparing your team to move many hundreds , if not thousands of applications . This requires a solid , factory approach to migration . Having determined which applications can move to the cloud , we set up the cloud environment , secured it , and prepared operations to receive the applications .
Since cloud platforms are not 100 % backward compatible , we must decide if the application can be migrated without change , or if it requires modification before the move . Depending on the complexity , age and architecture of the application , the level of effort to migrate to the cloud can range greatly . Therefore , we recommend an application migration workbench approach .
Setting Up Migration Workbenches
A migration workbench is a team of engineers who perform a specific set of migration tasks . There are five migration workbench types . They are as follows :
• Rehost -- Generally referred to as ‘ Lift and Shift ’, this workbench is a machine to machine migration of the application and data to the cloud platform . This is the easiest of the migration tracks and can be done using automation for most of the tasks . However , you don ’ t realize all of the cloud benefits , because the applications have not been developed or rewritten for the cloud .
• Replatform -- The replatform workbench is a team of engineers who perform minor , but critical replatforming functions to enable the application servers and software to run on the new cloud platform . Typically , this involves environment changes , not code level changes . Replatforming includes :
• OS and / or database version upgrades
• Significant DNS and networking changes
• INI and Configuration file changes
• Refactor -- Refactoring an application occurs when code level changes are required . This should include code scans for blockers that would prevent migration to the cloud . At CTP , we ’ ve developed software tools
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