Gartner Suggests Ways to Migrate Applications to Cloud
There are five ways by which organizations can move applications into the cloud, according to research firm Gartner.
The first option is to rehost or redeploy applications to a different hardware environment and change the application’s infrastructure configuration.
Second option is to refactor or run applications on a cloud provider’s infrastructure. Organizations can also use the third option -revise, i.e. modify or extend the existing code base to support legacy modernization requirements. Once this is done they can use rehost or refactor options to deploy to cloud.
Option four is rebuilding the solution on PaaS, discard code for an existing application and re-architect the application. Finally, IT organizations can replace, i.e. discard an existing application (or set of applications) and use commercial software delivered as a service.
IT organizations can rehost on infrastructure as a service (IaaS), refactor for platform as a service (PaaS), revise for IaaS or PaaS, rebuild on PaaS, or replace with software as a service (SaaS).
“When the CIO issues the simple directive: ‘Move some applications to the cloud’, architects face bewildering choices about how to do this, and their decision must consider an organization’s requirements, evaluation criteria, and architecture principles,” said Richard Watson, research director at Gartner. “However, no alternative offers a silver bullet: all require architects to understand application migration from multiple perspectives and criteria, such as IT staff skills, the value of existing investments, and application architecture.”
Watson continued: “Choosing the optimal application-migration option is a decision that cannot be made in isolation. This decision is not solely an issue of migration but is truly one of optimization: Which cloud platform and migration techniques offer the chance to optimize the application’s contribution to stated and implied business and IT goals? Those business and supporting IT goals, described next, should be driving any cloud migration decision — not a rush to experiment with new toys.”
By Anuradha Shukla
