Adopting Cloud: Why, When, and How?

Reading Time: 2 minutesMany of the customer conversations I have these days cover the efforts organizations are undergoing to migrate their applications to the cloud. The conversations are deeper discussions than simply around the adoption of SaaS applications; we talk about how to leverage cloud in conjunction with existing infrastructure to:

Modernize IT systems
Improve the pace of innovation and increase agility
Increase developer productivity
Reduce costs

But there are many approaches and decisions that have to be made. The challenge is to balance the benefits of moving to cloud against the investment required to determine what makes most sense for each individual use case.

Just a few years ago, when people explored the concept of cloud it was primarily looking at what existing systems could be replaced with SaaS offerings. An example of this is a project to adopt SalesForce.com. But today, there are many viable approaches to migrating applications to the cloud, all with considerable business value. In my customer conversations, I am often asked how to determine what is the right approach for each organization. However, the real question should be for each application, rather than organization: “What are the points I need to consider for that specific application to determine the right approach?” Cloud needs to be considered on an application-by-application basis to ensure you are maximizing business value and not wasting valuable resources migrating an app that will not benefit from transport to a cloud environment.

In taking this approach, you can achieve a more fine-grained methodology in either leaving the application status quo or replacing it with a cloud alternative. The options you have to consider include:

Replace: As mentioned above, this is when you replace an application on premise via a SaaS offering. An example of this is when users adopt Salesforce
Rehost: This is when you “lift and shift” your application from your own systems onto a cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform without modifying the applications
Refactor: Similar to rehosting, you modify the application so that it can begin to take advantage of basic cloud capabilities
Rearchitect: This is when you significantly change the application so you can benefit from cloud-native capabilities
Rebuild: In this option, you start from scratch and build the application specifically to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities of the platform you are going to leverage

This is just a start of the why, when, and how of adopting cloud. Join me for a webinar on January 25^th at 3 convenient times for your location: 10am GMT, 11am EST, or 11am PST. We’ll discuss:

What cloud technologies other organizations are utilizing and where they are on their cloud journey
What a cloud-native approach to IT entails
How to make use of existing investments via a hybrid cloud environment
Common cloud practices and architectures
Cloud challenges and potential approaches to addressing them