Migrating Enterprise Applications to Cloud - Best Practices

Public and private cloud resources hold great potential for the creation of new cloud applications, improving performance and cutting the costs of traditional applications. Migrating the right traditional apps to the cloud can also bring new life and functionality that offers the enterprise additional benefits.

It might seem ideal if you could just re-write and re-deploy all of your enterprise applications as agile, cloud-native applications, but it’s not a practical solution. You need to select the right applications that will gain the most business benefit from a migration to the cloud—and have a plan and resources to get the job done.

APP TRANSFORMATION - KEY BEST PRACTICES

Reduction in business disruption: While you likely have some great in-house IT expertise, there are many reasons to bring in external help to get traditional apps to the cloud. Some of the reasons boil down to the simple adage, “you don’t know what you don’t know.” Most internal IT departments are staffed to manage the current applications as they are currently deployed and don’t have the range of experience needed for a complicated cloud services migration effort. In addition, expecting your existing IT staff to keep everything running, while taking on complex application migration projects, is a good recipe for a less than perfect application migration—and introduces the risk of a very probable business disruption. It’s hard to focus on all the details of a migration project while keeping the business up and running on the existing environment.

Reduced risk to your business: Professionals who do nothing but move traditional apps to private and public clouds are able to leverage a wealth of cross-industry/cross-customer experience. Their expertise is invaluable in helping decide which applications are the best to move, how to move the applications, manage the move of the applications and bring the new applications on line with the least disruption to the business. Cloud application migration experts are able to leverage the knowledge and experience gained across thousands of clients, giving them clear line of sight on how to get the job done—and get it done effectively and efficiently. This expertise will save you time, money and reduce business risk. Offloading responsibility and risk to a migration partner gives you “one throat to choke” and gets the apps deployed right the first time and at the right price for you.

Skilled and experienced app migration decision-makers: Most cloud services are geared to web based applications using http protocol and API connections. Traditional apps are not usually architected to easily convert to web-based apps. They are designed for backend transaction processing using proprietary protocols. Trying to write some middleware that converts the legacy protocols to cloud protocols takes time to write and usually provides a suboptimal result. Further, not all of the apps are fit for private cloud or public cloud and not all apps need to be virtualized. Just being able to assess the apps that are best to move is a skill based on experience. Applications need to be selected based on suitability for cloud services deployment, the platform required for cloud deployment and whether they really qualify for cloud services at all. If it’s determined that an app is not suitable for cloud, what do you do with it? Retire it? Redeploy on more efficient hardware? Again, significant expertise is needed to help make the right decisions.

3 .Making the most of multi-level project expertise: The right expertise includes having a technical knowhow of cloud application development and deployment. There are large organizational and cultural shifts required for IT staff and users that must be managed. Successful migrations must also have a team well-versed in enterprise systems/applications architectures and that understands how to manage applications across cloud and traditional IT environments. The end-applications need to take into account the specific enterprise’s organizational culture. Finally, significant project management skills are required for an enterprise size transformation. Many organizations will find they do not have the time, experience or expertise to devote to core enterprise applications migration. In addition to the required technology layers, the enterprise can find great value in a migration partner to fill these gaps who also has knowledge of and access to tools that support and speed up the migration process.

Putting proven expertise to work for you: For customers adopting cloud, and heavily investing in on boarding their mission-critical IT workloads to hybrid platforms, it becomes important they use proven expertise, methodologies, processes, and tools that ensure a successful transformation. Businesses need to select a partner that can provide best practices and expertise cultivated from numerous customer migrations that move the right application workloads to your right mix of hybrid infrastructure in a fast and risk-mitigated manner. This partner should also be capable of assessing, modernizing, and integrating your apps for the cloud and be able to manage them once the transformation of your enterprise with hybrid cloud resources is complete.

Transforming with The Right Mix: Transforming to a hybrid infrastructure enhances and increases manageability of applications, workloads, and services across traditional, private, and public cloud environments. Migrating traditional apps to cloud services is about finding ways to improve application performance, cost, and agility. It involves matching each application and workload to the right IT platform. Every hybrid platform is unique, and is never a one-size-fits all solution. By finding the right mix of IT platforms to accelerate your unique enterprise, your business will be able to transform faster, while reducing time and risk, with the right partner to deliver the knowledge and expertise.