The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 49

Enabler #2 - Objective Assessment and Analy-
sis with Rules
Once we have the required visibility into the landscape and
the various assets, an assessment and analysis determines
the fate of an application. As described above, an analysis
effort can be either at the estate level, the specific business
and applications level or the infrastructure level.
The outcome from an estate level analysis typically pro-
vides visibility and direction for the organization, including
first movers. It also shows where the organization needs to
focus its efforts in the short, medium and long term to meet
business objectives.
In the context of an application level analysis, a typical ask
is: which applications are best suited for migration and what
platform and architecture patterns are suitable? The key
application metadata used in such an analysis falls into four
categories: business, technical, operational, security and
governance. Examples of technical metadata categories
include: architecture, technology stack, automation, perfor-
mance, scalability, dependencies, data size and data
velocity.
A suitability analysis requires defining cloud-ready charac-
teristics and a scoring mechanism that can be applied to all
applications to determine whether they should be moved to
the cloud. For example, an organization can define the fol-
lowing characteristics that deem an application not suitable
to be moved to the cloud platform:
• Application is large, single instance and/or mono-
lithic, and cannot be broken into services
• Application has an external dependency that cannot
be reached from the cloud platform
• Application is not compatible with list of approved,
compatible cloud libraries
• Application has contractual, legal or licensing issues
due to a third party packaged application or technol-
ogy needed for running in a cloud environment
Once you deem an application is suitable, you can choose
the appropriate cloud platform and migration pattern. We
recommend a quantitative approach in which each of the
application’s characteristics are scored against an endpoint
and summed up to determine the suitable cloud platform. In
many instances, the target cloud platform decision is based
on other factors, including licensing, contractual availability
of specific services or affinity.
Various factors determine the migration pattern, including
business function, objectives, business cycle, criticality and
priority, application architecture and effort required. For
example, a custom, off-the-shelf application may be more
suitable for Rehost (rather than Replatform or Refactor).
You can apply a set of rules to the characteristics of an
application to determine the migration pattern.
Determining cloud suitability and migration pattern
requires creating and defining what suitability means and
then carefully analyzing the characteristics of the applica-
tion using objective and qualitative means.
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