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It is no longer a question whether your organization will move applications to the cloud; it’s only a matter of when and how it must be done. In this article, we will share our insights on what is required to make this transition successful. We will highlight various perspectives that should be taken into account when you consider a cloud migration and explain how you can determine the right strategy to follow.
Do you have a business case for migrating to the cloud?
When we talk with organizations about cloud transitions, we see that a lot of different approaches are taken. The reason for this is that the chosen approach and steps to take are highly dependent on the perspective of who in the organization is asked to lead the transition.
If you ask the developers how they can move their application to the cloud, they will come up with great plans on how to change their application’s architecture to micro services and how they can use the latest .NET Core framework, since it has been optimized for cloud workloads. This will lead to a high investment before things can be moved, because the fundamental differences of this type of architecture require the application to be rewritten.
If you ask the IT operations department how to make the transition, they will come up with a new way to provision infrastructure and set up a service catalog from which customers can request new virtual machines that will now be provisioned in the cloud. Furthermore, you will see extensive network architectures and a lot of complexity, because they try to implement their current systems using cloud infrastructure, which is quite different when you want to get the maximum benefits from the cloud.
These are two examples of many other perspectives. Are they wrong? We don’t think so. But we do think these approaches are suboptimal and will incur high costs and low return on investment. To prevent this, an answer should be given to the question: which migration strategy will contribute to your organization’s business and IT goals? In other words: what is the business case for migrating an application to the cloud?
