Cloud Adoption 101: The Drivers, Barriers, and Keys to Migrating Enterprise Apps to the Cloud

DevOps has hit the C-level and it's permeating beyond approval for pilot programs. Enterprise executives are now talking about DevOps in terms of scale and ROI. With the key to accelerating large scale DevOps transformations often hinging on flexibility, the cloud has become the de facto solution for businesses to host their apps. But while the cloud offers the framework to reduce costs and consolidate workloads, there are a ton of roadblocks when it comes to migrating massive, diverse application portfolios.

During a recent webinar, Jay Yeras, Partner Solutions Architect at AWS, discussed the various drivers for migrating apps to the cloud, the barriers enterprises might face, and how they can overcome them.

You can watch the complete webinar here or check out a breakdown of Yeras' guidance for shifting enterprise applications to the cloud below.

What Are the Common Drivers for Moving Apps to The Cloud?

1. Drive Business Agility and Increase Workforce Productivity

Surprise! Enterprises want their software development teams to be more productive. And Yeras typically sees AWS' customers' ability to deliver on features increase at a rate of 30% to 70% after migrating to the cloud.

2. Innovate and Drive Digital Transformation

As businesses adopt more modern technologies for developing software, they want to move their products to a more modern framework to fully realize the benefits.

3. Reduce Costs and Consolidate Workloads

Every enterprise wants to reduce costs, consolidate workloads, and improve their overall efficiency. Whether the business is looking at updating their legacy systems or building net new applications, the cloud lets them offload intensive compute workloads and consolidate data center usage.

What Are the Barriers to Migrating Quickly and Cost-Effectively to The Cloud?

1. The Value of The Cloud Isn't Properly Demonstrated

IT leadership needs to gain a true understanding of the value the cloud brings their organizations in terms of cost savings, operational resilience, rapid application delivery, and increased productivity.

2. Application Interdependencies

Enterprises often house complex, diverse application ecosystems riddled with interdependencies. Data is housed in various resources and in different formats. Some of it is out-of-date, and some of it requires special tooling. Without accurate data for mapping application dependencies, resources, and resource utilizations, it will be a bumpy flight to the cloud.

3. Lack of Available Cloud Resources

Developers can exhaustively repurpose applications to be cloud-ready, but if cloud resources aren't available to them on demand, then prepare to hit the brakes.

How Can You Overcome the Barriers to Migrating to The Cloud?

1. Build a Data-Driven Business Case for Cloud Adoption

A strong business case for migrating to the cloud is built on cost analysis, cost of change, labor productivity, and value to the business. Jay suggests determining the expected future costs of running on a platform like AWS compared to your existing costs. And mapping things like migration, tooling, and staffing costs against expected ROI to demonstrate when a project will be cash flow positive.

2. Map Application Dependencies

Enterprises need data-driven insight to guide and influence the decisions made during the migration to the cloud. An Application Release Orchestration (ARO) solution can leverage data across cloud, container, and even legacy environments so that release processes can be managed and orchestrated across all apps in the ecosystem.

3. Cloud Resources Are Made Available In a Just-In-Time Basis

Enterprises need to give their development teams the ability to instantly provision and de-provision cloud environments while ensuring that the right controls are in place. Bringing cloud resources into the DevOps release pipeline also enables usage to be properly tracked.