Everyone goes on about the cloud and how you need to hurry up and move… but what a lot of organisations struggle to understand is what to move and how to move it? Companies usually do not have the resources internally to assess their estate of applications and do not have the technical ability to decide what needs to be moved and in what form they will be moved. With these initial blockers, organisations really struggle to make clear steps towards moving their estate into the cloud.
The key to a successful strategy and migration to the cloud is the analysis of an organisation estate.
A lot of organisations are unaware of their estate, meaning there are escalating costs for management, duplication or unused applications costing the organisation money.
The analysis exercise is really useful to get a single version of the truth around applications, contract costs and architecture, this can then feed into a target architecture and migration strategy.
All applications that are server, management or cloud should be analysed further to be categorised into one of the six R’s:
- Retire
- Re-host
- Refactor
- Replace
- Re-envision
- Remain
The target architecture and migration strategy document outlines the 0-24 month plan based on the categorisation mentioned above, to migrate the qualified applications to the cloud whether IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. Firstly the applications of low criticality and low complexity are deemed as quick wins to move to the cloud and can quickly move an organisation forwards.
Many organisations also gain quick wins with the retirement of applications, this can show an instant saving in costs (usually covering the outlay of consultancy to do the analysis and more).
How do we display and present all this information? We should be using the latest and greatest technology in Office 365 to promote the great functionality and features being constantly introduced.
The analysis of the estate is collected and displayed through a SharePoint list, PowerApps and PowerBI, this way the customers see all the analysis but in a more user friendly and visual way.
Once a customer has all this information they can start working towards Azure with a clear migration plan, outlook of their estate and potential cost savings.
