Cloud-readiness has been a major topic of conversation in our offices as of late. While working on the Nolio ASAP Cloud Pack, I came across a great little article by Danny Bradbury on the Register in which he discusses why and how to move applications to the cloud. As you read this article, as yourself: “Am I cloud ready?”
Are your applications ready to live in the cloud? It’s all in the preparation.
So, you are ready for a journey to the cloud. You have evaluated the benefits and you think you are ready to migrate your applications to a castle in the sky.
But the road to cloudy happiness is a long and winding one. Getting your applications into the cloud takes preparation.
Why move?
The first step is to nail down the motivation for the move. Cost reduction is usually a key motivator, as companies pool resources by virtualising their hardware.
Agility is another. Putting applications in the cloud makes it possible to provision computing power and storage faster and more flexibly than running them on dedicated tin. Cloud computing also helps regulate volatile demand.
After you port everything to the cloud, you will want to benchmark it against a set of assumptions made at the start.
Your success metric may be to reduce capital expenditure on hardware, for example, or to increase the reliability of your application infrastructure. Perhaps you are shooting for a more flexible infrastructure that lets you implement new enterprise applications more quickly.
Unfortunately, these kinds of applications are the ones subject to most resistance. Symantec’s Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud survey (registration required) last year polled 3,700 companies around the world.
It found that mission-critical enterprise apps were less likely to be virtualised within the next 12 months, let alone managed as part of a private cloud environment. Instead, companies were choosing web apps, Office applications, email and calendaring for virtualisation.
A general perception of lack of control is holding companies back. They are worried about what virtualisation will do to disaster recovery. They fret about security issues such as authentication vulnerabilities, account hijacking and how to control an environment that is also running other applications.
Clearly then, if companies are serious about shifting applications to the private cloud, they had better make sure that the orchestration layer above the virtualisation part is pretty solid.
What does this involve?
Click here to read the full article by Danny Bradbury
Click here to learn more about the Nolio ASAP Cloud Pack – enabling cloud readiness