Understand Your It/Applications Architecture

It is important to build a comprehensive understanding of your applications’ architecture before considering a cloud migration. You must know every component, dependency, and integration. Part of understanding your applications’ architecture is knowing each application’s performance characteristics and resource requirements. This includes CPU, memory, network, disk utilization, latency, response times, end-user experience, and even how they contribute to your business and revenue goals. 

Fix Any Performance Issues Before You Move

The Cloud is not a solution to remedy applications with known performance issues. It will only worsen the situation. It is imperative to fix any known performance issues before you begin a migration. Fix alerts, false positives, optimize slow database queries, and smooth over erratic response times prior to beginning your migration. It will save time and money.

Know-How Users Utilize Applications And What Value The Application Delivers

When you make a move to the Cloud, not only is it important to know your applications, it is equally important to understand how users actually interact and use the applications and what value they get from each application. Engage your employees in the review process and external users that depend on your applications to access digital services. Understanding the value of each application is essential in determining the priority you establish for migrating applications to the cloud environment.

Make Key Cloud Provider Metrics Easy To Access

The Cloud is dynamic, and like any other technology, cloud services can fail. Cloud vendors provide access to a rich set of metrics and event streams. This data enables you to detect and respond to changes automatically. In most cases, these metrics are not in context with the overall application’s performance or business value. Most traditional monitoring tools do not provide support for the new class of metrics generated by cloud infrastructure. This fact makes it imperative to choose a performance monitoring solution that understands the cloud services being utilized and integrates and correlates these metrics with the application and user experience.

Proactively Check User Experience and Test

You should demonstrate success early in the migration process because this will inspire the belief and enthusiasm required to push an enterprise migration to the Cloud forward. A poor user experience will kill your migration quickly. A modern technique to keep tabs on user experience is synthetic monitoring. This involves continuous testing of an application’s key transactions from multiple locations around the world to ensure your software and services are truly performing in all corners of the globe. Test repeatedly.

Prove the Migration was Successful

Plan ways to demonstrate the benefits of cloud migration. Show the new application architecture and that Service Level Agreements are being met or exceeded; how server response times remain unchanged or even improved; how auto-scaling is absorbing unpredicted spikes in traffic and how taking advantage of multiple regions around the world reduces latency and improves the user experience. Show how engagement and conversion improves along with response times for key customer journeys through the application. Remember that although you may see the benefit of cloud migration, your business colleagues require more proof. Promote what the company gains from cloud adoption early and often.

Realize Cloud-Based Applications Require Modern Monitoring

When you are in the Cloud, it doesn’t reduce the need for monitoring. The Cloud demands a performance monitoring solution that understands the dynamic, diverse nature of cloud workloads. The performance monitoring solution you choose must be capable of everything you would expect from a traditional monitoring service and be capable of tracing distributed transactions through integrated services, monitoring container technologies, and correlating cloud infrastructure changes and events with traditional metrics. Your monitoring solution must easily accommodate server and container instances that last only hours, minutes or even seconds.

Prepare to Use Cloud Bursting For Instant Scalability

Make Cloud bursting a part of your cloud strategy. This technique allows on-premise applications to access additional resources in a public cloud when capacity is not available on-site. This is important during times of peak demand. Cloud bursting provides a reliable method to prevent service interruptions for users. Burstable capacity can also save you money because you only pay for additional resources when you need them. If you don’t take advantage of Cloud bursting to supplement and expand your data center’s capacity, then you will never realize the full value of your cloud investment.

Ensure Applications Drive Business Outcomes

The most important thing to consider when contemplating a migration to the Cloud is to ensure that your applications can continue to fuel your business growth by delivering the agility and speed you need to innovate quickly as well as the operational efficiencies that keep your costs under control. It is essential to correlate your applications’ performance metrics with customer engagement and revenue growth objectives, with a focus on your variable cloud costs, especially for new feature releases. Be objective in your evaluation. If there is insufficient customer demand and business value in migrating an application, it may not be worth moving at all. You do want to ensure a cloud environment that can scale to changing customer and business demands. It does not matter where your applications run as long as they continue to provide the scalability, flexibility, speed, and agility you need to respond to changing conditions quickly.

Plan For A Multi-Cloud Strategy

When you adopt a multi-cloud strategy, you can leverage various clouds for different applications and workloads. You can help your bottom line costs by performing monitoring and engaging in analysis to select the optimal Cloud for each application. You don’t have to finish where you start, nor do you have to stay with a particular cloud provider when customer growth and demands push your applications to the limit.