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Date posted: 7th October 2015
Most organizations migrate to the cloud with a mission focused on direct reduction in costs. However cost reductions are not guaranteed for every application. But is this necessarily a vote against cloud?
Cloud migration has many benefits. Reduced costs, improved agility, scalability and flexbility are top of mind for IT leaders as they considered cloud migration. That said while the cloud benefits many applications, not all apps provide the expected direct cost reduction.
To analyze whether it’s cost-efficient to migrate an application to the cloud it’s important to have a process in place. In addition IT and your Cloud Managed Services Provider needs to understand rules that apply to each type of application.
Whether you are building a new application or migrating an existing one off physical server you should create a profile of the workload you plan to host on a public cloud platform such as Amazon Web Services.
Profile types vary application by application and IT should define the necessary services related to that application such as messaging or database. IT should also consider the resources needed including compute, memory, storage.
Additionally, IT and Managed Services should define the overall architecture, list its core components and define how they work together. This provides a clear understanding of the new or existing application’s design and how to properly host it in the Amazon Web Services public cloud.
Without undergoing major updates or upgrades, applications that aren’t well-architected are not good candidates cloud cost savings. Older applications, for example, are typically tightly coupled to data storage. Therefore, enterprises can’t easily distribute the application across many public cloud machine instances, which is required to make management more cost-efficient.
The next step is to create a business case. A basic business case for a new or existing application defines the application’s benefits and the advantages of hosting that application in the cloud. This allows enterprises to justify the resources required to build or migrate an application to the cloud. A business case typically includes:
Ultimately, there should be a clear benefit for cloud migrations. If there isn’t, the applications should remain on a physical server.
The reality is that all applications should not end up migrating to the cloud. IT need to take into account how effective and cost-efficient the application will be in a public cloud platform and whether additional costs will be required in order to migrate it to Amazon Web Services.
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