Why Application Migration isn’t the Goal, but it will help you reach your Goals

Every company has their own individual goals, but app migration will help you reach them. 

By Adam Jasinski

Workload Migration is an enablement for long term business sustainability. The drivers are typically derived from a long-term strategy, focusing on long-term goals such as Cost, Agility, Security and Governance. 

The products that bring value to your business and your customers are at the core of revenue-generating operations; in a world where time to market and maintain high competitiveness, you must operate your workloads in a cloud-native manner.

Workload migration is the first step to empowering the long-term strategy and beginning your journey towards cloud-native.

Application migration presents a vast opportunity to analyse how your business delivers value to its customers and how this can be improved along the way. The workloads, products, processes, people, and architecture can be reviewed and realigned with the long-term vision to answer particular challenges you may face now whilst helping you get ready for the future. 

Gartner, in their “Top Priorities for IT: Leadership Vision for 2021” annual report, identified that one of the challenges might be the falling increase of the IT budgets (since 2019) and growing pressures on CIOs where “Steady progress isn’t enough anymore, though. Boards have CIOs focused on acceleration.”

Gartner identifies that “Organizations that have increased their funding of digital innovation are 2.7x more likely to be a top performer than a trailing performer”. Nevertheless, such large initiatives require appropriate planning and identification of proper Cloud Strategy, Adoption Framework and Operating Model that shape the organisation and its technology.

So, is application migration the ultimate goal of a cloud journey? In some ways, it is. Operating your workloads on the cloud typically relieves particular pains that you may be experiencing. Some of the hurdles may include high operating costs or difficulty maintaining and keeping up with all too frequently changing and complex compliance legislation. 

Eurostat, in their “Use of cloud computing services, 2018 and 2020” report has identified that “36% of EU enterprises used cloud computing in 2020, mostly for e-mail and storage of files” with a significant increase in usage of the cloud, where “Compared with 2018, the use of cloud computing increased by 12 percentage points”.

However, more interestingly, “55 % of those firms used advanced cloud services relating to financial and accounting software applications, customer relationship management or to the use of computing power to run business applications.” and that means that the future focus will be around migrating more legacy, customer-centric workloads. AL has seen similar patterns across organisations we have worked with across numerous sectors. 

When we consider an application migration, the response seems relatively straightforward – moving apps from A to B. I believe it is crucial to understand that there is much more to app migration than just shifting workloads. It is about uncovering the potential and the needed collaboration of all the stakeholders involved to plan, align and effectively gain the in-depth insights that will aid decision making. 

Let us begin by determining what the workload is? It is a set of artefacts, resources, systems, processes and people enabling us “the business” to provide value to our customers. 

Here is where we begin examining our challenges and asking questions around specific drivers that imply the need for us to migrate our workloads. 

What is our purpose? How will we concentrate on our business’s sustainability and its ability to provide value to consumers of our product or service? These are just some of the more general considerations that help us focus on long-term goals.

There may be situations where the challenges are so prevalent, and business impact is so significant that we need to be more pragmatic and take quick actions, even if these actions are not the best or an ideal solution. 

That balance of vision and pragmatism is at the core of every application migration effort. As we go through our workloads and review them, we begin to understand better and, in some cases, rediscover how our business operates. We begin to bring the people, processes and tools together all over again, and we have an opportunity to analyse and clearly define the impact a particular system has on the business and connect it back to our customers. 

In such unique circumstances, we can realign our current and previous efforts with the vision whilst maintaining the focus on the challenges at hand. That continuous realignment is tremendously valuable as it precisely identifies the concrete areas where we need to improve and focus on to provide the best solutions fitting the long term business goals. 

The same Gartner report has identified that “Only 12% of CISOs are able to exceed the expectations of executive leadership in all four areas.” one of the top concerns is being able to  “Embed governance in workflows”.

Imagine an example of a highly regulated and particularly security-conscious business. Throughout our review, we may discover that a Landing Zone is required to meet the compliance requirements. We understand that security will need to be enabled by default into everything we do from networking, identity management and data management. Such a platform will help us accomplish that goal. 

Above is an example of how we begin to cater to solve the particular challenges our business faces. It is evident that simply by revisiting our workloads and reviewing our understanding, we gain insights into how these workloads enable value and ultimately serve the purpose.

I believe businesses should view application migration as an enabler—an enabler for solving particular challenges and embarking on the journey of continuous improvement.  

Application migration is a tremendous and unique opportunity. It uncovers the hidden potential within the business. Let it not be wasted. 

If you’re looking to increase cloud adoption and learn how app migration could help to enable long term sustainability of your business, contact us today.

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