This morning, I had the pleasure of sitting in on Michael Collier’s Cloud Expo West presentation: “Migrating Enterprise Applications to the Cloud”.
The National Architect for Neudesic, Michael had some interesting guidance on how to decide which application to move to the cloud and how to prioritize their migration.
(One caveat: Michael was speaking directly in terms of standard public cloud offerings [commodity cloud if you will], and speaking about the comparison to “on-premise” or the self-hosting of applications.)
Triaging what applications are suitable for the public cloud involves what Michael called an “Application Suitability” score. Start by evaluating such factors as:
- who uses the application
- business value
- point in lifecycle
- number of users
- number of servers
- database size
- non-database data
- SLAs
- Usage
- complexity and platform
..and then build out an Application Profile. From that profile, you rate various parameters with an ease-to-overcome score between 0 and 5, 5 being the easiest. The parameters include:
- Platform alignment
- code migration,
- data migration,
- cloud accessibility
- policy barriers
- usage patterns
- life expectancy of the application
- SLA requirements
- data sensitivity
- regulation barriers
Another important comparison is the total cost of ownership (TCO) of cloud vs on-premise hosting and the ROI.
The total cost of ownership needs to take into account some factors that the CIO isn’t typically used to thinking about, like energy costs, cooling costs, AND some things he is used to thinking about, like labor for hardware maintenance, hardware replacement, software updates, etc.
Once all the costs are calculated, ROI is derived from the following formula:
ROI= TCO of self-hosting – TCO of Cloud solution – Migration expenses
The ROI, together with the Application Suitability score, can help IT decision makers decide which applications to move and which applications to move first for maximum ROI.
Great job Michael! And thanks.
The INetU team will continue blogging throughout the show, so make sure to follow @inetu on Twitter for all the updates!
