Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 20 | Page 84

///////////////////////////////////// FINAL WORD Driving successful transformation through cloud-native architectures Adapting to the cloud can be challenging if the correct approach isn’t taken and users must assess this in order to achieve the desired outcome. Michael Allen, VP and EMEA CTO, Dynatrace, discusses the steps to achieving successful Digital Transformation on a journey to the cloud. T here’s no doubt that everything is moving to the cloud. The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that global revenues from cloud services will reach US$554 billion by 2021. However, while we are all undoubtedly aware that the continued drive to the cloud is accelerating, many organisations are faced with the challenge of how to successfully migrate their applications to the cloud. For businesses to fully benefit from the efficiency and agility benefits that the cloud has to offer, it has to be more than a simple ‘lift and shift’ operation. Organisations that just move their existing applications directly from an on-premises environment to the cloud will struggle with inefficient resource consumption and cumbersome code that makes it difficult to optimise performance and innovate at speed. However, rebuilding everything from scratch can be incredibly costly and time consuming. That leaves the 84 INTELLIGENTCIO question; how can organisations increase their chances of ensuring successful transformation in the cloud? Charting a course to the cloud Before any decisions are made about how they are going to migrate applications to the cloud, organisations should start with an assessment of their on-premises environment. They need to identify which applications should be moved to the cloud, which should remain on-premises due to security and compliance requirements, and which can just be scrapped, or replaced with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution to simplify migration and ensure the best possible user experience. For custom-built applications that are to be migrated from on-premise to the cloud, often the best approach is to re-architect them into microservices and containers. www.intelligentcio.com