There are three critical areas of preparation that ensure successful cloud onboarding. The first step is workload analysis. Because workloads differ in terms of their importance and cost to your organization, a thorough workload analysis is critical to a successful onboarding process. For example, a highly optimized application may be relatively easy to migrate to the cloud, but the move may offer little or no additional benefit for the effort. As well as helping you identify and prioritize candidate workloads for cloud migration, this kind of assessment will help you detail the requirements for onboarding those applications that you do migrate.
The next stage is getting the application and associated services ready for onboarding. For example preparing an application workload for forklifting into a cloud environment will require virtualization if the application is not already running in a virtualized environment. Associated databases may also need to be rationalized to work within, or with, the cloud environment. As you tackle all of these, there are three fundamental characteristics to pay attention to: scalability, resilience and security.
The final step is choosing the right provider. When migrating applications to a cloud environment, the specific environment you choose and the services offered by your cloud service provider will determine the work you need to do and the help you can get in doing it. Ideally, therefore, you should choose your provider in parallel with analyzing and preparing workloads for migration.
To learn more download the cloud onboarding white paper from Interxion.
