1. Assess Application Portfolio
You have hundreds of applications that vary from
commercial off-the-shelf to home-grown and open-
source. All these applications have unique character-
istics–software versions, memory footprints, net-
work latency, BC/DR requirements, revenue and
business value and interdependencies between them.
You need to conduct a holistic review of those appli-
cations to understand which ones are already well
suited for the cloud, which ones could be well suited
with some amount of refactoring, a nd which applica-
tions should not be on the cloud at all. Knowing that
information is the first step in identifying what your
cloud costs will be. You also need to identify a com-
pelling first application to move to the cloud, to help
your organization understand what it takes to oper-
ate there and to test your hypotheses for the rest of
your application portfolio.
2. Design Appropriate Cloud Architecture
The goal of the cloud is not simply to mirror your cur-
rent infrastructure server by server, and subnet by
subnet, as is usually an organization’s first reaction.
You should be looking for ways to take advantage of
cloud features and capabilities to optimize your cur-
rent applications and infrastructure, while maintain-
ing or improving security, performance and availabil-
ity, and decreasing costs.
Yes, quite often you can simply move the application
to the cloud as-is, but that might not be the right
thing to do, and not just from a cost perspective. My
example above where a company had 700 develop-
ment servers is a good use case of the need to re-ar-
chitect something. Maybe instead of each developer
getting a server, the applications need to be re-writ-
ten, containerized, broken into micro-services, etc.
During the application portfolio assessment process,
you should have identified some characteristics for
your applications that will guide you toward whether
the app is good to go as-is, or needs to be replat-
formed, refactored or just plain retired. All these
decisions affect your future cloud architecture and
operating and migration costs. Step #10 in our
Cloud Adoption Blueprint outlines a solid migration
approach, and different ways to categorize your
applications.
3. Perform TCO / ROI Assessment
Do you really want to know how much public cloud is
going to cost you? Do you really want to know
whether shutting down those servers in 10 seconds
will make a difference? If yes, you need to take the
learnings from above and calculate the TCO of your
cloud operations, including your desired architec-
ture, maintenance costs, licensing and additional
incremental projections over the next three years. If
you need ROI, you will need to couple your TCO data
with a proper analysis of your current on-premise
costs for applications, infrastructure, human
resources and software licenses, and calculate the
costs of migrating or refactoring the applications on
their journey to the cloud.
Do these exercises need to be as comprehensive and
laborious as getting a Ph.D. in Computer Science or
an M.B.A. in Finance? No, but you should dedicate the
appropriate amount of time to ensure you have com-
plete visibility into what’s going to happen before you
get into the cloud.
And if you’re already running on the cloud and are
past the point of doing the things I am recommending
above, you should still be constantly watching your
spend and optimizing your operations. Amazon’s
announcement of charging for VMs by the second
might have a direct impact on how you decide to
architect your application.
Are you sure you're getting the most benefit out of
your public cloud? If the answer is not 100% yes, call
us. We can help.
Get started improving your cloud financial maturity today.
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