For many organizations, the route to digital
transformation is to migrate a set of applications
or workloads to an Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS) platform, aka “Lift and Shift”. Industry
analysts estimate “Lift and Shift” will comprise a
significant percentage of the initial migrations,
with the remainder of the migrations focused on
re-engineering applications to take advantage of
cloud native or SaaS capabilities. This white paper
will focus on how to de-risk the “Lift and Shift”
migrations with the Virtual Instruments Cloud
Migration Readiness (CMR) Service.
1. Background
One enabler of Information Technology’s digital
transformation is the “Cloud”, which promises
organizations significant value in the form of
business agility, faster innovation, on-demand
scalability and cost savings.
Once organizations decide to move forward with the
cloud, the question often asked is: “Where do I start?”
Even if your deployed on-premise applications are
well understood and documented, the first step is
to evaluate the current application portfolio from
a business function and life cycle perspective.
Understanding where applications are deployed,
and their interdependencies is an essential first step.
Due to business pressures or resource constraints,
many organizations find themselves with a limited
understanding of their on-premise infrastructure
particularly when it comes to application
interdependencies and infrastructure
components utilized.
There is range of possibilities when evaluating
applications for digital transformation, such as:
Decommission. There are new and better ways
to provide the business function. The digital
transformation driver makes the application obsolete
(e.g. implementing mobile apps). Why move it, if it is
at the end of its useful life?
Modernize the Application: Should the application
be re-engineered using Cloud Service Provider (CSP)
native services? Or should the application be “lifted
and shifted” to the cloud with minimal to
no modifications?
Rent the business function: If the business function
can be adequately delivered by a Software as a
Service (SaaS) provider, then why worry about
infrastructure, licenses and other data center
concerns when a SaaS provider can adequately
provide that business function at a reasonable cost?
Based on these possibilities, the organization
must evaluate and decide which cloud service
model makes sense for their targeted applications
and business transformation strategy, taking into
consideration the roles and responsibilities of their
organization and CSP inherent in each option.
The table below shows the different levels of
responsibilities between on-premises IT staff and
the CSP:
Infrastructure as a Service
Platform as a Service
Software as a Service
IaaS
PaaS
SaaS
Application
Application
Application
Application
Security
Security
Security
Security
OS
OS
OS
OS
Hypervisor
Hypervisor
Hypervisor
Hypervisor
Infrastructure
Infrastructure
Infrastructure
Infrastructure
Data Center
Data Center
Data Center
Data Center
On-Premises
Table no.1 On-Premise vs CSP ( highlighted ) responsibilities
2. The Cloud Migration
Puzzle – Start with a
corner piece
The “end to end” migration process to an IaaS cloud
is a challenging undertaking consisting of many
critical phases and spanning IT infrastructure and
application organizations. Digital transformation
will require changes within the IT and Business
organizations and processes in order to achieve the
business objectives.
There are several major pieces in the puzzle
consisting of different areas such as:
• Cloud configuration
• CSP Cost
• Security
• Compliance
• Resiliency
• Governance
• Billing and cost optimization architecture
So where do we start? As with any puzzle, we start
with the corner piece!
The CMR service represents a corner piece of the
puzzle, organizing and making sense of massive
amounts of data to which enables cloud
migration initiatives to make informed decisions and
move forward.
A Virtual Instruments CMR engagement answers the
following more detailed questions:
• How do I know which workloads to migrate and
which to retain in the data center?
• How do I choose the right cloud service provider
for each of my applications?
• How do I simplify the analysis and reduce the
time to migrate a large number of diverse
workloads?
• How do I “Rightsize” CPU, Memory, Network
and Storage configuration for each migrated
workload rather than simply replicate my onpremise configurations?
• How do I test cloud workload performance
before migrating the workloads?
• How do I prevent migrated workloads from
having unforeseen dependencies back to the
data center?
• How do I determine if migrated workloads are
performing adequately and what can I do if
they aren’t?
CMR offers a solution to de-risk cloud migration by
validating the suitability of the targeted applications
based on their on-premises performance SLAs, their
dependencies, the preservation of SLA performance
in the target CSPs and the estimated costs.
There are three fundamental questions that need to
be answered when migrating applications to a cloud
delivery platform:
1. W
ill my applications perform as expected in a
public cloud? (Application Fitness)
2. How much will it cost to run my applications in
a public cloud? (OpEX)
3. Which Cloud Service Provider is the best choice
for my applications? (Cost and Fit)
CMR leverages the Virtual Instruments Professional
Services team, the Infrastructure Performance
Management experts. A comprehensive investigation
using workload analytics, workload playback and
automation capabilities that are based on the Virtual
Instruments VirtualWisdom and WorkloadWisdom
performance and capacity analysis tools will be used
throughout the services engagement, providing
unparalleled insights into your production application
infrastructure estates.
The term “application” or “workload” or “virtual
machine” will be used interchangeably throughout
this document. It refers to a business application,
which is a unit of interacting software that will
typically be moved as a single component. A
workload has connections of various kinds with other
applications and systems.
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