Application Optimisation

There are specific considerations that need to be made when moving applications to the Public Cloud. How they are treated will depend on how old they are, how they were coded, and whether they are still vendor supported.

It is more than likely that you will not be able to migrate all of them directly into Public Cloud. Understanding the best option for each one is the key to ensuring a successful migration plan.

Our Application Readiness service is a tried and tested process that discovers all the applications in your existing environment and proposes the best approach to remediate them. Working with you, we decide which ones can be moved straight away and which ones will need more work to perform in their new environment.

Key Features:

• Identify each service and its business owner

• Understand and map service dependencies and interactions

• Provide design options to determine candidate architecture along with any additional software elements required for each application

• Categorise each application according to the required work and expenditure versus its life-cycle position

• Any specific security requirements or constraints

• Decide where transforming an application make sense according to its business criticality - a highly available platform for critical apps, versus low investment for those being retired or replaced

The Methodology:

To support the decision-making process, we follow the industry standard Gartner “Five Rs” approach:

• Rehost

  Re-deploy applications to a different hardware environment and change their infrastructure configuration. Rehosting an application without making changes to its architecture can provide a fast cloud migration solution.

• Refactor

  Run applications on a cloud provider’s infrastructure. The primary advantage is blending familiarity with innovation as “backward-compatible” Platform as a Service (PaaS), meaning developers can re-use languages, frameworks, and containers they have invested in, leveraging code the organisation considers strategic.

• Revise

  Modify or extend the existing code base to support legacy modernisation requirements, then use rehost or refactor options to deploy to cloud. This option allows organisations to optimise the application to leverage the cloud characteristics of the provider’s infrastructure.

• Rebuild

  Rebuild the solution on PaaS, discard the code for an existing application and re-architect the application. Although rebuilding requires losing the familiarity of existing code and frameworks, the advantage of rebuilding an application is access to innovative features in the provider’s platform.

• Replace

  Discard an existing application (or set of applications) and use commercial software delivered as a service. This option avoids investment in mobilising a development team when requirements for a business function change quickly.