Application Migration Planning and Execution for Real Business Results

It’s clear that customer-facing and employee-facing enterprise apps drive business/customer growth and operational efficiency. That’s why Statista expects IT spending on enterprise software to be around 517 billion U.S. dollars worldwide this year, a growth of 10.8 percent from the previous year.

Migrating your vital and productive apps to the cloud is all about maximizing growth and efficiency. But it’s easy to lose sight of how to achieve those results without the right migration plan. The question is how do you build up that new environment and set yourself up for success so you can leverage cloud migration for true business benefits?

Watch the video to learn about Application Migration. There is a summary below.

What You Want to Achieve with App Migration versus How to Achieve It

Your application migration needs to integrate and streamline business processes with secure anytime, anywhere data and workload accessibility, flexibility, agility, and cost savings. You also want to boost productivity through communication and employee mobility, customer UX, and deeper service access. That’s what you want to accomplish, but it’s tied to how you get there in terms of the migration approach.

Your current on-premise legacy applications and ineffective IT infrastructure are slowing business growth, operations, and revenue while sinking customer and end-user experiences. These apps and infrastructure problems add minutes to completing back-end or front-end application processes. These slowdowns multiply hundreds of times a day in ways resulting in lost customers, opportunities, and profits.

The bottom line is your legacy apps in on-premises data centers can’t keep up, and that leads to customer frustration and wasted employee time across departments and global locations. What you need to do is save time and money as the bottom-line measure of ideal application access and process fulfillment. But how you do it through application migration will determine if you can achieve those business goals.

Outdated Migration Approaches Lead to Disastrous Results

The old approach to app migration used by many businesses seems to have the benefit of being linear with a clear path for all your applications. The problematic reality is that it’s very slow and labor intensive, which equals high costs. It takes an extremely long amount of time to get through that.

This old migration approach is akin to the proverbial sausage factory where you define the process and enter the ingredients—in this case your applications workloads and databases—and put it all together hoping that at the end you get some traditional cloud migration benefit.

This type of ‘lift and shift’ migration approach typically breaks. You end up with resourcing problems and knowledge gaps that frustrate the workforce in process fulfillment and management gets frustrated because nothing is getting done. And the results of this old migration process just fall apart.

You may have had grand ideas and a true vision when you started out on this migration path, but without a coherent plan of what you want to accomplish at the end, the process of how you get there becomes a costly and broken bottleneck. There is a better way that we call our Leapfrog Approach.

The Leapfrog Approach to App Migration for Business Benefit Outcomes

What you want to do is leapfrog over all that uncertainty by defining your new environment at the beginning. This gives you a clean slate to go in there and define what you’re trying to achieve. This is all about aligning “what you want to accomplish” with “how you’re going to do it.”

Automating application processes on the back end can make the process of sales, invoicing, marketing, and other such operations can decrease the time, personnel, and associated costs spent in completing them. You want to build cost-effective and agile enterprise applications that everyone can use securely and easily. Whether they’re legacy or new, they must be part of a cloud architecture supporting better and faster decisions through data access and manipulation. The leapfrog approach is all about matching what outcomes you want to get with how to get there in the most efficient and cost-effective way where the “how” will mean:

• Building in DevOps automation and infrastructure automation to identify, prepare, and migrate the application quickly without error and human intervention.
• Leverage microservices to get higher application density across your business landscape so needed application processes happen fast
• Building every application you migrate with the Twelve-Factor App method so everything is cloud-ready from the start. This method focuses on best practices for building applications with portability and resilience when deployed to the web.
• Having a master data management platform where all your data is landing in some sort of data lake makes it easy to perform data analytics with the data in one place. You can then perform visualizations on top of that data and build out your artificial intelligence (AI) platforms. This gives you what you need to act on to make better business decisions.

The leapfrog approach allows you to create and execute a well-defined plan for what you want to accomplish in the cloud.

Faster Cloud Migration Business Outcomes Through a Leapfrog Approach

Planning For the Leapfrog Approach

We directly tied the above methods of how you migrate apps to the cloud to what you want to accomplish by moving apps to the cloud. You need to define the meaning behind terms like better growth, market share, operational efficiency, cost control, revenue growth, customer/end-user satisfaction, and others. We should base your definitions on actual processes, applications, workloads, and database access as they relate to the cloud.

One example is if you’re trying to strengthen the link between your company and your target market. Better market share growth requires versatile and agile web and mobile applications with:

• A larger consumer reach and segmented features and services to meet their changing demands
• Better customer support that increases user satisfaction, brand loyalty, and the overall customer base and bottom line
• Cloud applications designed for access security and easy recovery in case of data loss or technical blunders
• Benefits that are equally available and integrated across all end users in global or mobile locations.

This all starts with the process of first identifying your critical business applications, which in our experience is about 20 percent of the applications that you use. The idea behind our leapfrog approach starts with refocusing on these key applications as your transformation path for getting those into your new environment.

While you want to do a detailed analysis of all the older and legacy applications, the new applications would automatically transition to the migration bucket. The idea with the older apps is to figure out if it’s useful or if it’s time to decommission it. If it’s not actually being used effectively by people or generating revenue for the organization, it’s time to get rid of it.

This is also the time you should look at SaaS solutions as a potential replacement for a legacy app. The somewhat cookie-cutter and narrower control of SaaS apps means it may not give you everything you want in terms of customization and control. But the right SaaS choice can get the job done in ways that save a lot of time and energy since you don’t have to manage it. It’s likely you’ll find a legacy app that now has a SaaS solution that can work for your business in every important way.

This leapfrog approach with an accurate analysis of your applications at the outset really narrows down the landscape of what you need to migrate based on what you want to accomplish for the business operationally for end users and customers. You’ll still have a few tough decisions to make on the technical debt of some vital legacy applications, but we’ve got proven processes to help you deal with those as well in a future blog. If the Leapfrog approach sounds interesting let’s set up a call to talk about how you could use it for application migration.