The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 47
A prescriptive approach and framework
for a successful cloud migration journey.
In working with many clients across hundreds of projects, we continually hear similar
themes around large scale migration efforts. Here are the most common areas our cli-
ents struggle with:
Scale and Velocity Requirements for Migrating Large Numbers of
Applications: Most organizations take months to create future state application
deployment architectures, and then migrate a single application. When an enterprise
has hundreds of applications to migrate, this challenges the viability of migration.
Lack of Visibility into Complexities and Dependencies: If you don’t have vis-
ibility into an application stack, you can’t migrate it. Whether this is due to poor docu-
mentation, legacy or acquired assets, or decentralized deployment practices, it is com-
mon for organizations to lack visibility into application components, configurations and
dependencies. Even though an enterprise may have a list of all assets and their details
within a CMDB, how do you validate those assets, their architecture patterns and depen-
dencies to determine which assets must move, and whether they are compatible with
the target cloud platform?
Suitability of a Migration Approach: How do you determine the specific migra-
tion approach for an application (Rehost, Replatform, Refactor), and which applications
can leverage cloud native components?
Migration Sequencing and Execution: How do you determine and account for
the right sequencing and configuration changes for the various dependencies, and how
do you account for the configuration changes required during the execution phase?
Making a configuration change can take only a few minutes, but making the change out
of sequence, or missing a change, can result in many hours or even days of
troubleshooting.
Migrating Mission Critical Applications with Zero Downtime: Most enter-
prises have mission critical applications that must be up 24/7, with large data sets and
databases constantly updated with multiple upstream and downstream integration
points. Databases are especially difficult to move, and if moved incorrectly, these assets
can have a profound impact on the organization.
Let’s look at the six key enablers that must be in place for any migration project to
succeed.
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