5 Phases of Cloud Readiness Assessment

Cloud adoption is gaining speed as organizations worldwide believe this will put them ahead of their competition. The immediate pull to cloud computing is reduced total cost of ownership and less hardware for IT administrators to maintain.

Organizations who have regulatory concerns, the move to the cloud is not without risk. Enterprises have significant concerns about storing business data outside the walls of their enterprises, due to contract IT staff possessing a high level of access and control over information; available technology options to secure and manage user access and authentication; or even intentional or accidental actions of employees or contractors. To allow organizations to gain value from cloud computing initiatives while addressing compliance concerns, Locuz offers Cloud Readiness Assessment. Through this assessment, organizations are able to identify sensitive or regulated content and notify key stakeholders including compliance officers, company executives, and administrators of any at-risk content. Once the initial assessment is complete, a best practices approach is outlined to separate regulated and non-regulated content or workloads, and subsequently migrate appropriate content to the cloud.

There could be multiple objectives for an organization to consider a move to the cloud for eg. Agility, Cost Savings and Flexibility, Continuous Iteration and Innovation, Platform Breadth, or others. Similarly, all the workloads of an organization may not be suitable and compliant for cloud migration. To help you answer and make relevant and effective choices it is important for you to do a Cloud Readiness Assessment.

Cloud Readiness Assessment approach includes interactive consultations with stakeholders to determine business practices, goals, and opportunities to arrive at a plan categorizing Applications to Re-host/Re-platform/Re-factor for Cloud.

A thorough analysis of existing IT assets is completed using the right assessment tools covering IT Infrastructure, Security posture & Risk assessment, DC environment, TCO Analysis, etc. Some non-technical aspects should also factor into your decisions about which applications should stay on-premises: licensing, support, and regulatory.

Cloud Migration Plan

With the Cloud Migration Plan, we help you determine the right objectives & help you get clarity on what your Migration plan could look like. To be able to create a robust Migration plan we require to take your objectives into account, along with the age and architecture of your existing applications, infrastructure, and their constraints. Next, you need to understand the dependencies between applications and begin to consider what types of migration strategies you will need to employ to meet your business case objectives.

Locuz provide a practical roadmap and scalable methodology for moving large application portfolios to the cloud. Our Cloud Migration Methodology is a five-phased approach where we Assess, Classify, Restructure, Migrate, Optimize.

Cloud Readiness Approach

Phase 1: ASSESSMENT

This phase comprises of assessment of current Infrastructure, Tools being used, Cost & Benefit Analysis, and Security & Risk Assessment.

• INFRASTRUCTURE ASSESSMENT: Discovery of infrastructure assets, operating environment, architecture and service catalogue.
• APPLICATION ASSESSMENT: Categorizing Applications to Re-host/Re-platform/Re-factor for Cloud. Application to native service feasibility.
• TCO ANALYSIS: Identify current and migration cost, determine break-even costs and time frames and calculate saving following the transition.
• SECURITY & RISK ASSESSMENT
• Infrastructure security, identity and access control, regulatory compliance and security monitoring and analytics.

Assessment Summary

• A thorough review of IT services, common infrastructure, organizational and Service Management process components
• An IT strategy that provides a clear strategic path towards Business Service Management, including Cloud capability
• A roadmap providing a defined set of activities needed for Cloud readiness A security and compliance analysis of risks to your organization

Assessment Advantages

• Evaluation by our experienced Cloud Consultants generates current information about your organization’s IT as a solid foundation for successful planning
• The assessment right-sizes your budget and capability estimate, to help avoid overspending and optimize user experience
• An interactive interview with stakeholders facilitates “buy-in” and aligns solutions with the needs unique to your organization
• A written report by our experts provides the blueprint for a business case justification as well as performance, reliability, environmental, management and security designs

Phase 2: CLASSIFY

All the IT workloads of an organization may not be suitable and compliant for cloud migration. Based on the assessment report it is important to classify the workloads as Cloud compatible or non-compatible. Locuz consultants will prepare the classification report based on the analysis of various Cloud readiness parameters of workload, security, compliance etc.

Phase 3: RESTRUCTURE

There may be a need to restructure the cloud compatible workloads to make it Cloud ready before any planning of migration to Private / Public cloud. Locuz will recommend a best practice approach for the workload restructure. The following are the sample list of activities for restructure. Consolidation & Aggregation Resource Pooling & Sharing Plan for Workload Migration P2V & V2V Define Workflow Development Application Readiness

Phase 4: MIGRATE

Based on the Assessment Report, the recommended workloads will be planned to migrate to Cloud (Private / Public). Initially low priority workload will be migrated and after the confirmation of stability and availability tests, the necessary workloads will be migrated to cloud environment. Determine migration schedules and project milestones to ensure content is migrated to the cloud according to business need, allowing for roll-out to end users as business needs dictate. Propose a schedule for ongoing risk / trend analysis reports to monitor and understand exposure levels and whether the existing controls are working appropriately. All contingency steps will be planned to roll back in case of any situational need.

• Virtual to Cloud (V2C)
• Self-Provisioning & Automation
• Workload Balance
• Service Orchestration
• Workflow deployment
• Imply Security
• Monitoring & Reporting

Phase 5: Cloud Optimization

Cloud optimization is one of the key aspects that organizations today want to focus on as cloud services come to form an increasingly large component of their overall IT infrastructure cost. It’s no longer enough to simply evaluate and deploy a collection of cloud services — now, businesses need to closely monitor these resources to ensure maximum productivity, as well as security and compliance. Efficiency is one of the greatest advantages that cloud solutions have to offer today. Because as your infrastructure grows so does your cloud costs, its complexity, chances of it running into inefficiencies.

Originally published at https://www.locuz.com.