Cloud Advisory Service – Workload Placement and Migration Planning

Cloud Advisory Service – Workload Placement and Migration Planning.

Talking about Cloud is not enough, customers are ready to take advantage of Cloud Computing and ready to move. This methodology provides end-to-end guidance to transfer workloads from existing infrastructure to new Cloud Computer models -Bare Metal, IaaS, SaaS, PaaS to Server Provider, Hybrid, Public and Private. It helps enterprises recognize, define business heuristics, understand application workload patterns and finally categorize of applications, which can be migrated to cloud platform.

To make a smooth, strategic cloud migration, you should start with careful analysis to discern which cloud services are the best fit for your applications, whether they are custom or off-the-shelf. Next, you’ll need to select the most efficient migration approach, with a detailed understanding of the efforts involved.

Platforms

  • Dedicated and Traditional IT
  • Private Cloud, Service Provider Cloud, Public Cloud, Hybrid
  • IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

Assessing applications and workloads for cloud computing readiness allows organizations to determine what applications and data can – and cannot – be readily moved to a cloud environment and what delivery models (public, private, or hybrid) can be supported. The decision criteria may be refined as the assessment progresses.

We start with an in-depth inventory of your current applications, collecting data that feeds into our cloud assessment tools. The data is key for calculating the appropriate fit among public, hybrid and private clouds. This process also helps predict the most appropriate model for your migration.

To accelerate adoption of your cloud infrastructure strategy, you need to identify those workloads that will best fit your targeted cloud environment while also giving you a good return on investment. You also need a structured approach to analyze each individual workload in a timely manner. Workload Transformation Analysis for Cloud uses analytical tool and methodology to produce a detailed, quantitative analysis of both business applications and infrastructure components. From this, we can deliver a prioritized list of suitable workloads for migration to cloud as well as an analysis showing the potential costs and migration impacts
Assessing applications and workloads for cloud readiness allows organizations to determine what applications and data can – and cannot – be readily moved to a cloud environment and what delivery models (public, private, or hybrid) can be supported.

Today, enterprises are evaluating various Cloud platforms available in the market to optimize their business processes and maximize their efficiency and productivity. However, they are facing challenges in identifying and categorizing on-premise applications and assessing their level of suitability for migrating to the Cloud. The current landscape includes tools based on interviewing IT and business users for information gathering and subsequent manual assessment, which is based on primitive data analysis.

Leveraging its experience and expertise in migrating applications to Cloud platforms,  [Company] has developed an automated Assessment which helps identify applications that can be migrated to the Cloud and provides a two-dimensional analysis based on workloads and business aspect of applications.

Suitable Candidates for Cloud
  • Applications that are used by a group of mobile workers to manage their time and activity, and that contribute only limited information to the company’s broad management information databases.
  • Applications that are run infrequently but require significant computing resources when they run.
  • Applications that are run in a time zone different from that where your company’s IT personnel are located.
  • Development, testing and prototyping of application changes, even if the final applications will be run on your own infrastructure.  Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications.
Less Suitable Candidates for Cloud
  • Applications that involve extremely sensitive data, particularly where there is a regulatory or legal risk involved in any disclosure. These will at minimum require special treatment if they are to be run in a cloud service.
  • Applications now being run on the company’s private network and that are very performance-sensitive.
  • Applications that require frequent and/or voluminous transactions against an onpremises database that cannot be migrated to cloud computing.
  • Applications that run on legacy platforms that are typically not supported (or may not be supported in the long run) by cloud providers

Using and innovative, tool-based approach to workload analysis that places workloads in the optimal private, public, or hybrid cloud model by analyzing your business and technology requirements.

  • Business application alignment – maps selected applications to associated business processes to validate relevance and service levels for the business activity.
  • Application suitability assessment for cloud – examines your business requirements for selected application workloads and determines whether they are best delivered through a private cloud, puluc cloud, or Legacy IT environment.
  • Workload Placement analysis – analyzes selected application workloads to determine thier optmial cloud deliver model,including recommendations for specific public cloud service providers, based
The readiness assessment spans the following areas:
Business Considerations. Business considerations include the overall organizational readiness for using cloud computing. Is the application owner willing and comfortable with a cloud platform? How important is the application to the business or the mission? What is the risk tolerance level of the business, and is the culture favorable or resistant to change?  Application Lifecycle Considerations. Is the application still being defined? Is it up for a refresh? Is the application approaching retirement? Can the application be redesigned or undergo a technology refresh for cloud computing? Will there be an efficiency gain in using cloud computing? Instead of migrating the existing application to cloud computing, using an IaaS or PaaS approach, would it be better to replace it with a new SaaS solution?  Application Architecture Considerations. Is the application web-based, or built with a serviceoriented architecture (SOA)? If not, is the application such that it can be split into modular services? Is it monolithic, two-tier, three-tier, or n-tier? What is the level of effort required to modularize it or separate the tiers? Does the application scale out? Does it scale up? What are the demand fluctuations in the application? What impact will moving to cloud computing have on demand?
Data Considerations. Data governance, confidentiality, integrity and quality need to be preserved by the migration. Is the data bound by statutory compliance? Are there data sensitivity and privacy or confidentiality concerns? What data integrity concerns are there? How does the application manage data requests from a safety and security perspective? How much data exchange will occur between the components of the application and between the application and the user? Frequent data transfers may impose a higher cost as well as a performance lag.  Technology Considerations. These include the performance and resiliency of the network infrastructure. The migration design must account for multiple components communicating across network boundaries. Techniques such as network isolation, virtual private networks, elastic addressing and network segmentation can provide for a very robust and secure cloud environment. Ensure the application is designed (or can be modified) for resiliency—immunity to the interruption of transactions in midstream, as well as local fault tolerance. Is the application designed for high availability and disaster recovery? Finally, standard and open protocols are more readily supported across firewalls and on a public infrastructure than proprietary ones.  Security Considerations. The different parties – application owner, cloud service provider(s) and the customer’s IT department – must understand that security is their joint responsibility. Authentication and authorization remain the responsibility of the customer at the application level. The cloud service provider is responsible for security controls, identification and correction of system vulnerabilities, and defense against specific cloud-oriented attacks (e.g., at the virtual machine level), consistent with the level of service selected. Continuous monitoring is now common among cloud service providers and should be expected.  Integration Considerations. What are the dependencies between the application being migrated and other systems? Applications may depend on each other through control integration (they invoke each other), data integration (they read or write the same databases or files), or presentation integration (they are mashed up on the same window or Web page). The migrated application may even be the “system of record” for some key data in a Master Data Management (MDM) scheme. Finally, the migrated application may rely on common facilities such as a user directory for single sign-on and access control. The assessment must discover how extensive these integrations are, what protocols they use, what additional utilities or runtime libraries they rely on, and what their performance requirements are, including the frequency of connections and the amount of data involved.
Identifying workloads to move to the cloud can be tricky. You have dozens or hundreds of apps running in your organization, and now that you’re investing in the cloud, you’re tempted to move as many of them up there as fast as possible. As you’ll see in the examples below, cloud computing is indeed a good fit for many common workloads. But remember the old saw, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” It turns out you can lead an app to the cloud, but it doesn’t always make it run better, so you’ll also see how to identify apps that are better left in your data center in their current architecture.
Workloads that Are Not a Good Fit for the Public Cloud Characteristics Sometimes the cloud isn’t the right answer.
Here are some examples:
High-performance applications that demand a lot of disk I/O and network throughput
Some proprietary databases and the applications that run them require very high I/O and expect a consistent ability to read to and write from the disk systems.
In general, the public cloud uses shared resources, so performance varies. Most of the time it doesn’t vary too greatly, but some databases are better off in a private cloud or a dedicated hybrid configuration. Sometimes the problem is in the application design, when developers create the app without an eye to launching it in the cloud and unintended side effects can ensue. And certain legacy and enterprise apps may simply not work in the cloud, so they need to stay on your own servers. • Applications that demand low latency over the network Some databases – especially in analytics applications – require highthroughput replication and clustering, and it is still hard to deliver that throughput in the public cloud. Some organizations accustomed to high-performance network storage try to move their applications from network attached storage (NAS) or a NetApp appliance in a typical data center, and continue to use things like NFS storage in the cloud. But it’s hard to make an NFS server highly available in the cloud, and even then it won’t likely perform well. We see customers use S3 or Gluster for high-performance shared storage. • Specific hardware dependencies Not all hardware is available in the public cloud, so configurations that depend on rare or obsolete equipment are better off staying in the data center.

Accelerate your journey to the cloud with Cloud Advisory Service. This service evaluates your application workloads, determines which ones would benefit from migration to the cloud, and helps you decide on the best cloud deployment model.

You’ll build on best practices that Global Services has developed during thousands of application modernization engagements. Start planning the infrastructure you need for IT as a service (ITaaS).

The Cloud Advisory Service uses automated discovery and analysis to optimize placement of applications in the cloud. Analyzing the application portfolio with our platform is 50% faster and requires 75% fewer client resources than assembling the data manually.

Key features of the Cloud Advisory Service:

  • Application alignment maps your applications to business processes
  • Application suitability identifies applications that are right for cloud delivery
  • Cloud placement recommends the optimal hybrid, private, or public cloud model
  • Financial impact analyzes savings and costs linked to proposed cloud delivery models
 Accelerate your journey to the cloud with loud Advisory Service. This service evaluates your application workloads, determines which ones would benefit from migration to the cloud, and helps you decide on the best cloud deployment model.

You’ll build on best practices has developed during thousands of application modernization engagements. Start planning the infrastructure you need for IT as a service (ITaaS).

The Cloud Advisory Service uses automated discovery and analysis to optimize placement of applications in the cloud. Analyzing the application portfolio with our platform is 50% faster and requires 75% fewer client resources than assembling the data manually.

DISCOVERY – ASSESSMENT – MIGRATION – DEPLOYMENT – SUPPORT

DISCOVERY – Gather data, what application you have, who users them, how often when they were,Discovery/inventory application capature usage metrics,discovery phase is designed to grasp the number of applications you are running, how often you use them, who uses them, when they were written and in what language. We establish an assessment framework, discover and audit applications in the portfolio, and determine application disposition. To complete a thorough application inventory, we employ high-grade tools, including:

ASSESSMENT – Make key decision on the path and destination for each workload and application, Determine application disposition, lift and shift remediate, re-platform, decommission, detemine cloud deployment and services, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, private, public, hybrid, service provider, baremetal.After we establish a tailored assessment framework, we can help you determine the appropriate migration path for each application. We weigh critical factors such as security, scalability, your growth plan, high-priority business initiatives and risks, and regulations. Our assessment tool generates an impact analysis chart to determine migration-readiness. From there, we can discern the most appropriate target cloud deployment option (public, private or hybrid), a suitable type of service (IaaS, PaaS or SaaS), cloud vendor platform (such as Amazon Web Services, Azure, Cloud Foundry, Open Shift or Salesforce1 Platform) and the appropriate level of remediation.

MIGRATION PLANNING – Practical roadmap based on application assessment, plan, estimate, and prioritize migration, update business case, conduct pilots, design future architecture, define migration roadmap,Cloud Migration process, we align the assessment results to a practical roadmap. We update the business case, conduct pilot migrations—plan to reduce risk, etc., and then create a work plan for the overall migration, finalizing the cloud architecture. During the planning phase, we take into account key factors, such as: • Assessment recommendations and target architecture • Target environment availability for private clouds • Application dependencies • Budget and cost expectations • Business calendars Specific steps during the planning phase may include: • Estimating the application migration effort • Defining requirements • Creating a migration roadmap • Planning migration • Conducting migration pilots • Updating the business case • Designing a future architecture

MIGRATION AND TESTING – migrate applications and workloads at scale with automated tools and standard processes, remediate and/or migrate workloads and applications, document configurations, validate and accept.During the migration and testing phase, we mobilize Accenture’s Application Migration Factory processes, tools and teams to meet your specific requirements and objectives. The process includes a detailed migration plan, factory governance and operations model, all backed with Accenture’s industry-leading practices. Using tools such as eMPIR migration management and Blu Age®, steps may include: • Remediating and/or migrating applications • Documenting code changes and configurations • Migrating databases • Testing applications to help confirm migration has not changed functionality

DEPLOYMENT – Transition to support, Post migration review, update service catalog,Finally, it’s time to go live. Once we’ve worked with you to perform all the discovery, assessment, planning, and migration and testing, we can launch your cloud applications, providing support, performing post-migration review and executing technical decommissioning, as required. Your applications would now operate in a new architecture as public or private IaaS, PaaS or SaaS deployments.

MIGRATION

  1. Discovery Report
  2. Cloud Strategy and Design
  3. Migration Plan
  4. UAT
  5. SLA

Cloud Advisory Service – Workload Placement and Migration Planning helps customers to:

  • Identify and categorize applications which are most suitable for the Cloud
  • Recognize applications which are under peak usage, overloaded or underutilized
  • Support an agent-based and agent-less solution for discovery and monitoring of applications
  • Extract available metrics over a 4 week period to analyse workload patterns and business heuristics of the selected applications
  • Recommend on IT strategy – on premise vs. on Cloud
  • Support an agent based and agent-less solution for discovery and monitoring of applications
  • Customize data models in order to derive scores at an application level and IT portfolio levels
  • Automate reports on application performance and resource utilization
  • Analyze both application workload and business criticality

The Cloud Assessment collects parameters to understand the cost of on-premise application hosting. It provides detailed cost-comparison for existing on-premise infrastructure and on different cloud platforms. Based on the configuration of servers on which an application is deployed and its usage pattern, the tool recommends instance sizes for different cloud platforms. The feature includes ‘what-if’ type analysis to allow users to select different instances on cloud providers to understand the estimated deployment cost.

The Cloud Assessment supports automated reports which allow the user to get a clear understanding of the approach and reasoning for the categorization and assessment of applications, with additional information about their infrastructure and environment.

The following types of reports are supported:

  1. Inventory Report
  2. Analysis Report
  3. ROI Report
  4. Application Assessment Report
  5. Consolidated Assessment Report

Cloud Advisory and ITaaS Enabler (Visual Matrix)

  • Cloud Consumption Model Matrix (List of key Infrastructure solutions and matching Cloud Options with Cost Savings)
    • Email – Office 365
    • Database – Managed Database
    • Backup – BaaS
    • Desktops – Managed WorkSpace
    • Security – Managed Security
    • SAM – Managed SAM
    • WebSites
    • eCommerce
    • Storage
    • Printers
    • Internet Access – Managed Firewall
    • IaaS, SaaS, Managed

METHODOLOGY

Discovery

  • Phase 1 – Tools Setup & Information Gathering
    • Identify Servers with Enterprise Applications (IT)
    • Shortlist applications for assessment (Customer)
    • Setup the Assessment  Appliance
  • Phase 2 – Data Collection
    • Data Gathering (interviews, surveys, existing Documentation)
  • Phase 3 – Analysis
    • Monitor Data collection and extraction for algorithm processing
    • Analyze available metrics and identified workload partners
    • Generate HTML reports of assessment scores
    • Present for Customer Review
    • Validate business heuristics findings
  • Phase 4 –  Discovery Reporting
    • User entire available data set for processing
    • Identify workloads patterns through metrics
    • Identify Applications categories based on generated scores
    • Generate HTML Reports
    • Present to customer for review
  •  Tools
    • Uninstall Tools
  • Deliverable
    • Discovery Report
      • Application Usage Patterns
      • Business Constrains for Application
  • Categories
    • WAN Speed / Bandwidth / Carrier / QoS
    • Network – IP and VLAN (DNS, DHCP, WINs, DMZ, vLANS, IPs,etc)
    • Internet Link (Bandwith and Use)
    • DMZ
    • Firewall ACLs / Statistics
    • CMDB
    • CPU, Disk, Network, Time
    • VM and OS Statistics
    • Virtulization Statistics
    • Utilization and Capacity Performance
    • Application Dependency + iso/iec 19770-2 software identification tag
    • Application Package
    • Application Performance
    • SQL
    • Storage Performance
    • Active Directory
    • Exchange
    • Office 365 Assessment
    • Workstations
    • Printers
    • Business Hours
    • Peak Periods and Key Dates
    • Work Patterns (On/Off, Peak Activity, Increasing/Decreasing, Steady)
    • Peripherals / Serial Devices
    • Server Hardware
    • Rate of Change and Backup Configuration
    • Maintenance, Security Updates
    • Test, Dev, Production
    • Application List
    • COTS
    • Application Owner
    • LOB
    • Installation Information
    • Support Information
    • Dependency
    • Business Heuristics
    • Tiering
    • DEV, TEST, PROD
    • Scale-out vs Scale-Up
    • CPU, Memory, Disk
    • Transactional
    • Web Based, OS Based, Local Desk, Mobile, API / Service, DB
    • Security and Compliance
    •  In-House / Commercial
    • Storage Requirements
    • Network Requirements
    • Application Types
      • EMAIL
      • CRM
      • ERP
      • COLOBRATION
      • IN-HOUSE
      • COTS
      • SUPPY CHAIN
      • ANALYTICS
    • License Installed
    • License Usage
    • License Compliance

ASSESSMENT – Workload Placement Workshops

  • Deployment Models – Private, Hybrid, Public, Community, Service Provider or Financing
    • Workload Matching
      • Availability
      • Capacity
      • Performance
      • Technology
      • Costs
      • Security
      • Lift-Shift,Replication,Staged,Offline,Redesign
      • SLA
      • Operational
      • Heuristics for workload/application fit for cloud platforms
      • Business fit – takes into account business criticality, SLA requirements, security, legal and regulatory restrictions
      • Architecture fit – understands distributed architecture, scaling requirements and performance requirements
      • Technology fit – provides recommendation for cloud platforms based on technology stack
      • Cost of migration– estimates cost and migration effort
      • Backed by data from performance and resource consumption metrics
      • Nature of workload – analyzes data to identify trends and patterns
      • Usage patterns – categorizes applications based on specific usage patterns observed over a period of time
      • Loaded cost of running the workload on cloud – compares costs of on-premise deployment vs. cloud platforms to determine best ROI
    • Service Models – SaaS, PaaS, IaaS
    • RPO, RTO, DR Options
    • Business Impact Analysis
    • SWOT for Apps
    • SLA
    • Data Protection, Backup and Restore, Archival
    • Monitoring
    • Costs
    • Service Desk
  •  Connectivity
    • http://www.megaport.com/
  • Lift/Shift, Build, remediate, re-platform, decomm, optimise
    • Deliverable
      • Cloud Strategy – Workload Characteristics and Placement Strategy
  • Business Case
    • Service Management
    • ROI/Gap
    • Map ITIL to Cloud
    • ITaaS
    • CMDB
    • Technology Service Catalog
    • Security Governance and Requirements
    • Agile Method, CoBit,etc
    • BCP/ DRA / BIA
    • Tools
    • Facilities costs
    • Technology Tree

Migration Planning

  •  Design

Deployment

  • PoC
  • Test
  • UAT

 Support

  • HandOver
  •  Tools
    • ServiceNow
  • Self Service and Reporting, Provisioning

Deliverables

  1. Proposal Templates
  2. Workload Placement Templates
  3. Workload Placement Workshop
  4. Workload Analytics Template
  5. Cloud Business Case Template
  6. Cloud Security Template
  7. Cloud Detailed Design Template
  8. Consulting Methdology
  9. White Paper
  10. Flyer
  11. Sales Enablement
  12. Training
  13. Tools

Reference

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