Migrating to Cloud 2: Assess and Identify

The first and foremost step in migrating to cloud is to assess and identity. It is imperative to understand what values cloud computing will bring to the organization. And it will be specific to an organizational context. Each organization has it's own characteristic, it's own business drivers and pain points. Understanding your own IT dynamics is key to this initiative. 

Cloud computing benefits are known but not applicable directly to any IT organization without understanding it's pain points. The best place to find the required information is Enterprise Architecture continuum. 


For example, if you have already invested significantly in data center and you already have excess capacity to deploy the solution, then cloud may not look beneficial immediately. 

Looking at the roadmap, if you encounter some of the following scenarios


1. Some developments are waiting for resource allocations like hardware, then these can be assessed for cloud deployements
2. Proof of concepts for market testing e.g. developing some ideas for testing market feedback
3. Stress testing or load testing waiting for resources 
4. Batch processing applications which need huge amount of resources but for limited period of time
5. Build storage backup solutions (building such a solution needs significant investments)
6. Build a disaster recovery solutions (building such a solution needs significant investments)
7. Build content Delivery solutions - If you need faster delivery of contents across the globe but can not build such an infrastructure)
8. New solutions that will have variable loads or fluctuating demands
9. Existing applications seeking more resources to cater to increase in demands
10. Applications running on old servers, which are about to be decommissioned

Besides the above, there can be some of the non-functional requirements that can be fulfilled by using cloud.

If you think some of the solutions need higher availability (99.9%) of infrastructure and you do not enough expertise or resources to support such SLA, then transferring the risk to a IaaS provider is a good option. But you need to understand the providers SLA compliance levels.


Identifying the right components to deploy on cloud is a critical to the success of cloud migration.


The following are some of the inputs for doing the right assessment


1. Solutions Roadmap from enterprise architecture repository
2. Other architectural documents from EA Repository

3. Application/System monitoring and performance Reports
4. Capacity Planning reports

Please provide your feedback and some of your experiences on cloud migration.