Application Modernization
We will help you realize the benefits in moving to the cloud.
In the past few years cloud adoption has increased significantly, as it provides considerable value over traditional datacenters—achieving greater scalability, cost efficiency, and improved performance.
Many organizations are now looking to quickly take advantage of this value by migrating their existing applications and workloads. But cloud migration requires careful planning and strategy. One of the keys to cloud success is to determine the optimal platform and priorities for running business applications. Once considered optional, these applications are now central to infrastructure decisions and achieving company goals.
To enable successful migration, it’s important to have a strong plan in place that covers the end-cloud environment, training, and, most importantly, the readiness of your workloads and applications. To do this, you need to determine how to successfully create the initial technical plans and business justification, ensure your workloads will run as expected, and perform the migration with limited impact on the business.
Click each of the 5 R’s below to learn more.
This is also known as “redesigning” an application to modernize it—that is, to transform it with a modular architecture. Rearchitecting is modifying or extending an existing application’s code base to optimize it for a cloud platform and for better scalability.
Cloud provider services can be used directly as backend services of modern apps, which are highly scalable and reliable. This is likely the most time-consuming way to migrate an app to the cloud because it requires app code changes. One example of rearchitecting would be decomposing a monolithic application into microservices that work together and readily scale on Azure. Another example would be rearchitecting a SQL Server database to make it a fully managed Azure SQL Database.
Common Drivers Include
Application Scale & Agility
Easier Adoption of New Cloud Capabilities
Mix of Technology Stacks
Quantitative Analysis Factors
Application Asset Size (CPU, Memory, Storage)
Dependencies (Network Traffic)
User Traffic (Page Views, Time on Page, Load Time)
Development Platform (Languages, Date Platform, Middle Tier Services)
Qualitative Analysis Factors
Growing Business Investments
Operational Costs
Potential Feedback Loops & DevOps Investments
Also known as “repackage,” this stage involves using additional cloud provider services to optimize the cost, reliability, and performance by refactoring your applications. In lift and shift, you were only taking advantage of the provider-managed hardware and OS, but in this model you also take advantage of cloud services to drive down cost.
You continue to utilize your current application as-is, with some minor application code or configuration changes, and connect your application to new infrastructure services such as containers, database, and identity management systems. By employing modernized services in this scenario, you can lower cost and management.
Common Drivers Include
Faster and Shorter Updates
Code Portability
Greater Cloud Efficiency (Resources, Speed, Cost)
Quantitative Analysis Factors
Application Asset Size (CPU, Memory, Storage)
Dependencies (Network Traffic)
User Traffic (Page Views, Time on Page, Load Time)
Development Platform (Languages, Data Platform, Middle Tier Services)
Qualitative Analysis Factors
Continued Business Investments
Bursting Options/Timelines
Business Process Dependencies
This is also known as “redesigning” an application to modernize it—that is, to transform it with a modular architecture. Rearchitecting is modifying or extending an existing application’s code base to optimize it for a cloud platform and for better scalability.
Cloud provider services can be used directly as backend services of modern apps, which are highly scalable and reliable. This is likely the most time-consuming way to migrate an app to the cloud because it requires app code changes. One example of rearchitecting would be decomposing a monolithic application into microservices that work together and readily scale on Azure. Another example would be rearchitecting a SQL Server database to make it a fully managed Azure SQL Database.
Common Drivers Include
Application Scale & Agility
Easier Adoption of New Cloud Capabilities
Mix of Technology Stacks
Quantitative Analysis Factors
Application Asset Size (CPU, Memory, Storage)
Dependencies (Network Traffic)
User Traffic (Page Views, Time on Page, Load Time)
Development Platform (Languages, Date Platform, Middle Tier Services)
Qualitative Analysis Factors
Growing Business Investments
Operational Costs
Potential Feedback Loops & DevOps Investments
Revise the existing application by aggressively adopting PaaS or even software as a service (SaaS) services and architecture. The process encompasses major revisions to add new functionality or to rearchitect the application for the cloud.
An example of this stage would be code redesign to decompose the original application into smaller chunks, and then deploy using modern cloud provider services.
Common Drivers Include
Accelerate Innovation
Build Apps Faster
Reduce Operational Cost
Quantitative Analysis Factors
Application Asset Size (CPU, Memory & Storage)
Dependencies (Network Traffic)
User Traffic (Page Views, Time on Page, Load Times)
Development Platform (Languages, Data Platform, Middle Tier Services)
Qualitative Analysis Factors
Declining End User Satisfaction
Business Processes Limited by Functionality
Potential Cost, Experience or Revenue Gains
This refers to moving or discarding an existing application and replacing it with commercial software delivered as a service, or SaaS. SaaS provides a complete software solution that you purchase on a pay-as-you-go basis from a cloud service provider.
When you choose this option, all underlying infrastructure, middleware, app software, and app data are managed by service providers and located in their datacenters. The service provider manages the hardware and software and, with the appropriate service agreement, will ensure the availability and security of the app—and your data as well. SaaS allows your organization to get quickly up and running with an app at minimal upfront cost. Typically, you migrate existing data to the SaaS environment. Application data import/export is achieved with an API or configuration/admin console.
Common Drivers Include
Standardize Around Industry-Best Practices
Accelerate Adoption of Business Process Drive Approaches
Reallocate Development Investments into Applications That Create Competitive Differentiation or Advantages.
Quantitative Analysis Factors
General Operating Cost Reductions
VM Size (CPU, Memory, Storage)
Dependencies (Network Traffic)
Assets to be Retired
Qualitative Analysis Factors
Cost Benefit Analysis of The Current Architecture versus a SaaS Solution.
Business Process Maps
Data Schemas
Custom or Automated Processes
“One of our big objectives was to eliminate $3 million in capital costs over about three years, and to reduce our operating costs by approximately the same amount. At the same time, we wanted to improve our quality of service. With Azure, we’re confident that we’ll meet those goals.”
Jim Slattery – Chief Financial Officer | Capstone Mining
Why Migrate Now?
At first glance migration may seem like a technical decision, but at its core this is a business decision. Ultimately, it begs a fundamental question: what’s driving your business to migrate to the cloud, and why now?
The benefits of cloud are universal—reduced running costs, faster modernization capabilities, and increased security. But often, specific initiators first kick off the discussion within an organization, including:
Application Development & Modernization
If you’re in the software business, your resources are probably spread thin. And using on-premises platforms is likely not enabling you to adopt modern services. The cloud provides an integrated platform for modern development, where development teams can increase speed by up to 33 percent.
Ultimately, by migrating your current environment to the cloud, you’re putting yourself in a better position to accelerate your business. By reducing costs and making management more efficient, a cloud platform can immediately impact your IT group’s ability to invest back into core strategic projects, increasing security and reliability while advancing application development.
Operational efficiencies and reduction of operating expenses
Due to the reduction in hardware support, increased manageability, and efficiency of process, you can save an average of 20 to 30 percent on virtual machine (VM) resource configuration alone.
Decreased time to market/release
By reducing management overhead and freeing up budget, you can focus more time and effort on rapid software and solution development. Faster deployment of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) will enable your business to release faster and more often.
Support for scalability requirements that are more cost effective
When you have to plan for peak usage through on-premises systems, most of the time you’re left with servers that are running at less than 20 percent utilization. The cloud releases organizations from this model, enabling a scale-when-you-need-it approach.
Renewal of datacenter or hardware leasing
If you’re currently extending your budget on renewing hardware or paying for datacenter locations for hosting, this is the perfect time to look toward cloud migration. The cloud can make these necessities a thing of the past by enabling a cloud vendor to host these services for you.
Renewal of licensing
Nearly everyone has an annual licensing agreement with their major IT providers. These too require ample budget to ensure your virtualization and OS platform are sufficiently covered. The cloud can help you here, providing a pay-as-you-go offering to reduce this cost.
How Do I Approach Cloud Migration?
Sometimes cloud migration can be simple, with only a few decision points. However, your case may be more complex, depending on how many servers and virtual machines you use.
Your migration could require you to run parallel and iterative migration processes as you progressively move your applications and workloads to the cloud.
Whether your migration is simple or complex, it’s helpful to think of the basic elements of the process. Migration can be boiled down to three main phases, as illustrated in the model below.
We here at Oakwood are here to help walk you through this journey.
