It all starts with a Cloud Readiness Assessment

What servers do I move to the cloud? When do I move to the cloud? What applications do I move to the cloud? Are we ready for the cloud? How much is it going to cost me? Is the cloud expensive? Is the cloud secure? These are just some of the questions we hear from customers who want to move to the cloud. These questions are all valid and it is imperative to understand the answers to these questions. This article follows on from my previous article “The Importance of Cloud Governance” where I speak about the difference between Cloud Governance and Cloud Management. The assessment is the first step in setting up the correct governance of your cloud.

It all starts with the assessment. So, what is a Cloud Readiness Assessment and what are the key elements of such an assessment? The answer may seem simple, but in many cases, this is a very complex answer.

A Cloud Readiness Assessment should include the following elements:

• A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis – understand which cloud platform is the right one for you
• Discovery of all the applications – readiness to move these applications to the cloud
• A migration plan – how to execute right the first time

Driving a Cloud Readiness Assessment allows customers to formulate a simplified and optimised Cloud Strategy. The assessment eliminates guesswork, wasteful over-provisioning and provides peace of mind that decisions are data driven for the best possible results.

When delivering the assessment there are a couple of key elements that need to be addressed. The assessment needs to provide a very detailed performance analysis of the current compute, storage and network resources observed. This will include CPU utilisation, storage capacity, and IOPS. By observing this, a deep understanding is gained into the projected costs of running the infrastructure in the cloud.

The assessment at a minimum should include the following components:

• All applications and their dependency details
• Inbound Firewall rules
• Client applications DNS
• CPU usage by application and the TCO to migrate

Now that there is a deep understanding of the current infrastructure, it is imperative to right-size the instances based on the data that was collected. This will allow for the best possible and most optimal performance of the computing resources at the lowest possible cost. With this in mind, “what-if” scenarios can be run to assist in the planning and forecasting. These will include pricing plans and projection analysis of current performance vs. recommended cloud performance.

The last step in the assessment process is the Migration Plan. Once the “what-if” scenarios have been completed and the optimum configurations have been decided upon, the migration plan needs to be completed. The migration plan must include what workloads will move first, are the workloads going to use IaaS or PaaS services and a toolset or toolsets that will be used for the migration.

If you would like to do a Cloud Readiness Assessment, get in touch with us today and let us assist you in your journey to the Cloud.