Selecting an appropriate path for an application or a portfolio of applications is one of the most critical decision points in a cloud journey. Assessing the nature and criticality of an existing application is usually the starting place. Another critical factor to consider is the implementation (migration) cost and time for each path to cloud. The four cloud adoption options are re-host, re-platform, re-factor and re-write in the order of increasing cost, effort, cloud benefits, and TCO reduction. Out of these, re-host usually does not involve code change and is relatively simple.

Mapping cloud operating metrics into a 3x3 matrix is a good starting point on planning for a cloud journey. In this matrix, the cloud operating metrics would move to the right if they are critical for customer intelligence applications; that would be an X factor. Another critical dimension while planning cloud migration is identifying the interface dependencies between selected application(s) and others – both inbound and outbound. These could be synchronous, asynchronous or batch.

Understanding the application architecture, its internal organization, and inter-dependencies are critical before migration. This can be a very complex and labor-intensive task if done manually and can be error prone. Not fully understanding the existing code can lead to issues related to transactions, data corruption, session handling, and performance.

To read more on the top challenges and their mitigations in the cloud journey, download the perspective paper here.