Cloud Migration Strategy for Applications

The first question that comes to our mind is from where to begin and what is the appropriate platform to choose for applications from the multiple options which are available in the cloud space such as:

Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS)

Platform as a Services (PaaS)

Software as a Services (SaaS)

Cloud + On-Premises (Hybrid)

Before choosing an appropriate platform it is important to understand business criticality and amount of system integrations with the individual application because that is going to play a vital role in migration. To do that there are few evaluation criteria which we need to consider, however these criteria already exist in many enterprise portfolio management system that can be leveraged for cloud migration and which can help in application assessment. It can be categorized in two different perspectives. i.e.

Business - Top-Down approach which describes where an application should go

Technical - Bottom-Up approach which describes where an application can go

The top-down approach helps to determine the degree of benefit to business and drive toward to choose an appropriate cloud platform, as shown in the figure below:-

The bottom-up approach helps to determine the current state of infrastructure and drive toward to choose an appropriate cloud platform, as shown in the figure below:-

After doing this exercise we can have a good visibility & understanding of current state to the desired state and which cloud platform options are the best fit for an application and from this point cloud migration journey will start.

To start toward cloud migration journey is to create a road-map.

Wrapping Up

The above application migration strategy will help you to decide and move quickly to the cloud.