Today’s business strategy naturally includes the cloud. According to a recent Gartner research, “cloud shift” will affect more than $1 trillion in IT spending by 2020. With more infrastructure and applications moving to the cloud in support of digital transformation, one of the decisions that you must answer is what’s the best approach for cloud migration.
One thing is for sure, there is no “one size fits all” strategy when moving data and workloads to the cloud. Whether a workload should be moved by lift-and-shift or re-architect, depends on many considerations including technology, dependency, and usage.
For example, for commercial or off-the-shelf applications that can’t be re-architected, lift-and-shift might be a good option. This approach offers a fast move the cloud without any code modification. On the other hand, re-architect often involves a significant amount of recoding of an existing application to take advantage of cloud-native frameworks and functionality. In other cases when a legacy system no longer provides value, it may be the right decision to retire the application.
Blair’s Cloud Readiness Assessment is centered around Technology, People and Process to help you make the right decision for each application and make sure your multisource workloads can be migrated securely and efficiently to the cloud. The assessment includes the following 4 steps:
Step 1 Discover
We scan your applications and networks to determine technologies, dependencies and usage
Step 2 Assess
We work with your IT / business stakeholder to understand your current IT footprint and future business requirements and determine which migration model you can use for each application – lift and shift, rearchitect, or retire.
Step 3 Plan
Create a migration roadmap based on your timeline, budget and resources.
Step 4 Execute
Begin the migration based on a detailed assessment result, migration roadmap and best practices to ensure a smooth transition to the cloud.
Moving to the cloud is no different than any other migration – it is critical to thoroughly understand the environment(s) and make all necessary preparations. Your time and efforts invested in pre-migration assessment will have a lasting impact on your long-term cloud success. Contact Blair’s cloud technical consultant to start a Cloud Readiness Assessment.
