It’s really that simple. Remember that first piece of advice from the blog “4 Steps to Getting Started in the Cloud”? Be self-aware? You manifest that by assessing yourself. You’ve partnered, right? Assess your situation with that partner. You will get an even better picture of what your project entails after you accurately assess where you are, what you have, and feasible paths to follow.
So, What Does a Cloud Readiness Assessment Look At?
Migrating to the cloud isn’t just porting applications to a new, physical location. It is an evolution of thought and technology. Let’s take a look at what is involved in a Cloud Readiness Assessment.
1) Assessing Your Organization
One, they assess your organization. It’s pains. It’s goals. It’s people and culture. How going to the cloud could fix or enable you. It’s more than technology. Assessments will make that business case with you, and give you more credibility with support from a partner. We do that by hosting collaborative sessions to dig down into those areas.
2) Analyze Your Technology & How it’s being used
Typically, you run an inventory assessment tool to monitor your environment for several weeks to document assets, how they are used, and what licensing is involved.
Studies show that when these tools are run, they discover 20% MORE than what you thought you had. NOW, you are very self-aware. You know exactly what you are dealing with, how your systems are being used, and usually a lot of other things you did not know!
Zombie servers incur lots of licensing costs but no usage. Low usage applications are over-architected. Applications that have spikes in traffic throughout the day yet have extended periods of no usage. All these scenarios just scream to be cost-optimized in the cloud.
3) The Importance of Understanding Usage & Platforms
Do not undervalue this exercise. When moving to the cloud, understanding nuanced usage or technology platforms is more important than architecting something on-premises. In the cloud, you pay for what you consume and use. Ergo, you must set up your new ecosystem in a way that scales, is right-sized for real-world scenarios, and find the usage patterns it incurs. You design for elasticity with far more cost-optimized options than fixed targets provide
It is an evolution of thought. That is why you need an experienced partner as your culture morphs to a new way of thinking and capabilities.
More Good News:
More good news. Cloud vendors often enable partners to do assessments at reduced costs to you by funding assessment projects and tools. So, if you are at all trepidatious, take advantage of those opportunities. A good partner with good cloud vendor relationships, capabilities, and experience is going to not only light your way on this new path but open doors of opportunity along the way.
Shameless Plug: CleanSlate is one of those partners!
Your Future is in the Cloud
Are you thinking about moving to the cloud or assessing your current cloud environment? You probably have questions. Click the button and fill out the contact form. We’ll get you the answers you need to help you make the right decision.