Factors in Migrating to the Cloud

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    
 

▪   Adoption, Migration and Acquisition Cost

▪   Customization

▪   Uncertainty

▪   Cost of Data confidentiality and availability loss

▪    System(s) documentation

 

 

 

 

▪    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    
 

▪  Complexity of current systems

▪  Compatibility with current Systems

▪   Scalability

▪   Availability and Accessibility

▪   Security

 

 

▪  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

 

 

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?

 

▪  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

 

 

 

 

▪      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

 

▪   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

 

▪    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