Transforming to cloud? A solid groundwork is the key to success

The cloud is everywhere. Every business and organization is either in it, moving to it or considering how to get to it. With the ongoing push for digital transformation, many businesses and organizations see the cloud as a gateway to achieving complex, innovative and mission-critical projects.

So why are so many organizations still in the migration process or just thinking about a future move? Because even today, a decade or more after the cloud went mainstream, they still face a host of challenges. 

Cloud migration is no simple task for a number of reasons, one of them being the sheer complexity of migrating applications to the cloud. In fact, several international surveys indicate that as many as 60 % of organizations struggle with migrating complex applications.

These migration challenges, among a host of others, are what we in CGI help clients overcome every day. Therefore, I'd like to share with you some pieces of advice that we know from experience are paramount to succeeding with your cloud transformation.

Assess in detail

To put it simply: A solid groundwork is the key to success. You need to assess your current application portfolio in detail before you can even begin planning to move to the cloud.

Can you retain some applications? Will you have to retire, replace, replatform, rehost or refactor? And, not least, what are the dependencies between applications? My guess is you'll be surprised when you map dependencies across your systems and applications.

Any undiscovered dependency between two or more applications can easily become a major obstacle when you migrate applications only to find out that something is broken because of an unnoticed "missing link."

The crucial groundwork

In CGI, we call this part of the process application portfolio analysis and application cloud readiness assessment. This is the phase where we help clients lay the groundwork that is a crucial part of a successful transformation to the cloud.

The overall assessment must be holistic, scalable and industrial; the latter meaning that the approach optimizes cost and business value of cloud adoption at an enterprise scale.

Here are the six main areas to address, using a combination of people and tools as a means to discovery:

• Business - business criticality, business agility, business alignment, business services
• Technology - applications, servers, dependencies, capacity, utilization, network bandwidth, lock-ins, code, versions
• Security - security and regulatory requirements, data classification, security controls
• Operations - incidents, SLAs, managed service requirements, HR skills, contract lock-in
• Finance - TCO, value delivered, migration costs, future TCO modeling, cost savings
• Strategy - strategic fit, evolution plan, emerging technology fit, original standards alignment

All of the above is part of what we do on a daily basis when helping clients with their cloud transformation projects.

The steps are taken directly from our proven cloud adoption framework that addresses all phases of a cloud transformation project; from strategy and preparation to migration and operations.

If you'd like to know more about how to transform your business' or your organization's it to the cloud, feel free to reach out to us.