Enabler #2 - Objective Assessment and Analy-
sis with Rules
Once we have the required visibility into the land-
scape 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
provides visibility and direction for the organization,
including first movers. It also shows where the orga-
nization 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 typi-
cal ask is: which applications are best suited for
migration, and what platform and architecture pat-
terns are suitable? The key application metadata used
in such an analysis falls into four categories: Business,
Technical, Operational, and Security and Gover-
nance. As an example, technical metadata categories
include: Architect ure, Technology Stack, Automa-
tion, Performance, Scalability, Dependencies, Data
Size and Data Velocity.
A suitability analysis requires defining cloud-ready
characteristics, and a scoring mechanism that can be
applied to all applications to determine whether they
should be moved to the cloud. For example, an orga-
nization can define the following characteristics that
deem an application not suitable to be moved to the
cloud platform:
• Application is large, single instance and/or
monolithic, 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 technology 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 deter-
mine the suitable cloud platform. In many instances,
the target cloud platform decision is based on factors
other than technical features, 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 application using objective and qualitative means.
SPRING 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 19