Migrating an application or an estate to the Cloud is complicated. Budget, Organisational, Technological, Human Resource issues abound. The following table is a summary of key factors which need to be assessed within a framework and methodology, of migrating assets or an estate to a Cloud platform.
| Factors | Current | Cloud Systems |
| Cost | ||
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▪ Adoption, Migration and Acquisition Cost ▪ Customization ▪ Uncertainty ▪ Cost of Data confidentiality and availability loss ▪ System(s) documentation
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▪ What is the current cost of maintenance of the system? ▪ How customized is the current application? ▪ How frequently do the application requirements change? ▪ Current HA, backup and business continuity plans (most likely these don’t exist) ▪ Is there documentation, on network topologies, architectures, code, applications, databases, schemas etc If not you need to do this first |
▪ What is the cost of set up, subscription and maintenance of the cloud system? ▪ Can we move customized systems to the cloud – how much refactoring etc? ▪ If updates are infrequent, we don’t need CI/CD ▪ HA, DR, cold backup ▪ Relevant documentation which explains the architecture and OSI stack |
| Technical | ||
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▪ Complexity of current systems ▪ Compatibility with current Systems ▪ Scalability ▪ Availability and Accessibility ▪ Security
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▪ Is the complexity of the current systems high? If yes, is maintenance taking too much of IT resource time? ▪ Are the current systems very tightly integrated or modular? ▪ How easily can the current system grow and scale with respect to the business needs? ▪ How critical is the application in terms of its need to be available and accessible? ▪ What kind of redundancy measures does the current system have? ▪ What parts of the current security measures are physical and location based? ▪ What is the expertise level of the current IT staff in terms of dealing with security threats? |
▪ Will the cloud be able to support the complex systems in place? ▪ Will the cloud be able to seamlessly interface with the other legacy applications that are not on cloud? Or do we need a middleware platform? ▪ How easily can the cloud vendor /platform scale? ▪ HA, reliability, accessibility – how and at what cost? ▪ Cloud should improve security across the OSI stack including encryption, password/key management, access control
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| Organizational | ||
| ▪ Top Management Support
▪ Firm Size ▪ Skill of IT resources ▪ Employee Buy-in ▪ Innovative Culture |
▪ Is there an IT and business need for change?
▪ Does the current system adequately support the current firm size and its requirements? ▪ Current skills and resources? ▪ Users satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the current systems? ▪ What is the level of technical expertise for the users for the current system? ▪ Is the company silo-based, or innovative and flexible ▪ How often does the organization experiment with newer ways of doing things? ▪ To what extent is the organization tolerant of failure?
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▪ How knowledgeable are the top executives in terms of the benefits and risks of moving to cloud?
▪ Is there at least 1 top Executive ready to be the project sponsor? ▪ Cloud skills and knowledge? ▪ How skilled are our IT resources in dealing issues related to cloud-based application? ▪ Employee impact and user impact? ▪ How will the Cloud change the org and its culture? |
| Organisational | ||
| ▪ Industry Adoption
▪ Competitor Pressure ▪ Regulatory concerns
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▪ How does the organization’s current system compare to systems being used in the industry?
▪ How does the organization’s current system compare to its leading competitors? ▪ Do the current systems need to pass legal or regulatory audit
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▪ How far has cloud based application use penetrated into the relevant industry?
▪ Have the organization’s important competitors already adopted cloud? Are they seeing benefits? ▪ Will the cloud based system pass all regulatory and audit checks |
| ▪ Vendor Expertise/ Availability
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▪ Cultural fit with the organisation
▪ Skills, resources, deployment models (on vs offshore) ▪ What are the terms and conditions in the service level agreement with the current vendor? ▪ Industry and cloud expertise which is proven |
▪ References within the industry or in the particular application?
▪ Can the current terms and conditions be replicated or assured by the cloud vendors? ▪ Resources, scale, management capabilities |