Step 2 in Planning Your Cloud Migration: Know Your Apps (and Workloads) from your Elbows

Over the past 17 years, we’ve helped many enterprises plan their move to the cloud. In every case, one of the primary questions they face is trying to decide which applications they should migrate, which should move together, and in what priority.

When you consider the multiple cloud offerings and options available and the thousands of workloads and applications an enterprise likely has, the complexity of this challenge isn’t surprising.

While there are lots of things to consider in addressing this, identifying all workloads and applications and knowing their complexity and importance to the business are fundamental building blocks needed to start.

Building a Roadmap for your Migration

So, what do you need to know about your workloads and applications to build the roadmap for your migration?

1. Impact on critical business services
2. Availability requirements
3. Migration windows
4. Data-handling and compliance procedures (i.e., PCI, SOX, HIPAA)
5. Dependencies and interdependencies on resources

You need to align application criticality to your cloud strategy and ensure the correct cloud provider is identified for each application and workload.

Key to your success is a centralized decision-making platform that:

• Visualizes inter-app relationships to understand and identify highly complex applications, and legacy dependencies that may not be well suited for public cloud
• Integrates data from cloud sizing, cost, performance, and assessment tools assessment, sizing, and performance tools
• Allows for testing and modeling of workload placement

Bottom line, understanding application complexity and priority to the business are critical factors for ensuring a smooth migration and avoiding undue risks.

Read the full Solution Brief on Cloud Migrations.

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