By the end of 2018, more than half of global enterprises will rely on at least one public cloud platform for digital transformation, Forrester predicts. Beyond 2018, the global public cloud market will continue to grow at a 22 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), making public cloud platforms the fastest growing cloud segment. It’s easy to see why. The cloud offers undeniable benefits: more predictable costs, faster deployments, resource agility and more. In fact, you probably already have workloads in the cloud today.
However, moving applications is not merely a matter of lifting and shifting individual applications from the current infrastructure to the cloud. Today’s applications are highly interdependent, and the complexity associated with migrating applications to the cloud has grown. Without understanding the interdependencies of applications and the supporting infrastructure, costs and risk can quickly skyrocket during migration.
It is essential that a thorough, data-driven analytical process is executed to gather all the relevant data required to truly understand underlying dependencies and complexities. Therefore, a successful migration path is based on grouping interdependent applications and migrating the entire group versus a single application.
Application dependency mapping to reduce risk
Application dependency mapping gives you clear visibility into all the components and interdependencies of your business services and applications, including software, servers, storage, security, networking infrastructure and data. With this information, you can fully assess the impact of a migration and take steps to reduce risk.
A well-executed application dependency mapping process:
- Utilizes tools to monitor and collect application and infrastructure performance data.
- Clearly defines the parts of the IT infrastructure that support a business service.
- Assists with identifying interdependencies of business applications and the supporting infrastructure across different business services.
- Significantly reduces the risks in lift-and-shift moves of infrastructure to cloud platforms.
- Accelerates re-platforming and re-factoring efforts as part of a digital transformation strategy.
- Helps identify those business services that have high probability of latency issues if separated from specific infrastructure dependencies.
- Helps identify server groups to move together to minimize impact to business during the move.
- Helps identify key relationships between infrastructure and business unit services which, in turn, will improve disaster recovery planning and execution.
Find the right partner for AWS, Azure and Google cloud migration success
To lower the risk of your cloud migration—and maximize value while aligning to business objectives—consider talking with a partner that has:
- Complete knowledge of cloud platforms – Increase migration success with a partner that has a thorough understanding of the largest public cloud providers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform—and the best workloads for each provider.
- Extensive migration experience – Look for a partner that has documented methodologies, backed up by significant experience moving many workloads and the knowledge needed to avoid costly mistakes.
- Project management resources – Ensure the greatest possible success by seeking a partner with project managers on staff who can ensure that everyone’s in the loop, activities are tracked and milestones are met.
In other words, look for a partner with the experience to get results and reduce risk to your business.
Logicalis: Your cloud migration partner
Logicalis’ Hybrid Cloud Consulting Services team can help your organization plan for the constantly changing technology demands of the public cloud. Our 20+ years of experience with traditional data center solutions and technology, extensive migration experience and a DevOps practice dedicated to innovating moves to the cloud leads to greater success for your project.
Our key application mapping services include:
- Application Rationalization – We’ll help you map existing applications and identify any redundancies, and then assess whether to migrate them and where—or replace, re-architect or retire them.
- Application Dependency Assessment – We’ll also help uncover application relationships to infrastructure and supported business processes, define the destination and sequence of migrations and create a financial analysis of cloud and hybrid cloud deployment models.
We also offer additional cloud services, including: Cloud Strategy Planning and Road Mapping, Data Migration Strategy, Cloud Monitoring and Management Requirements, Data Protection Assessment, Network Connectivity and Security Assessment, and Resource Requirements and Sizing Assessment.
Download this datasheet to learn more about our Hybrid Cloud Workshops and how they can help provide you with a roadmap for potential next steps.
Kyle Swanson is a Director of Business Development for the Logicalis Cloud Practice, responsible for providing subject matter expertise on cloud deployment models as well as understanding customer needs and developing a portfolio to meet those needs.