Cloud Assessment: A Game of Strategy

All of these are the right types of questions to ask, and a concentrated Cloud Assessment can help you get the right answers. 

A Cloud Assessment broadly consists of the following two areas:

1.     Quantitative Assessment: This is generally supported by tools which can scan datacenter infrastructure and gather details regarding datacenter assets and asset information (CPU utilization, Memory utilization, Disk utilization, etc.). The tool runs for a few weeks (Typically, 4 weeks) and gathers this information. It is highly recommended to select a tool which gives you server dependency and features to leverage that server dependency to define application dependency. This is a very important input for migration planning and decisions. A lot of such tools give features to use this asset information to calculate corresponding Cloud consumption costs for different Cloud providers (IaaS costs). I have been in multiple discussions related to security aspects of such tools and it is extremely important to tackle those at the very beginning of Cloud assessment discussions and we have done that successfully.

2.     Qualitative Assessment: This is portfolio rationalization exercise to gather information for each application (Perceived complexity, business criticality, license portability, technology, etc.). Information gathering is done through stakeholder interviews, online/offline questionnaire. Online questionnaire and portfolio visualization tools (which would show charts and different views for portfolio) are recommended for large (> 100) applications.

The output of both the above assessments is combined together to provide recommendations for the entire portfolio and also for each individual application.

The recommendations typically consist of the following:

1. Organization Strategy and its alignment with Cloud strategies
2. View of portfolio
3. Migration planning
4. Report card for each application consisting of Infrastructure, Technology Landscape, Application Dependency, Target Cloud platform, Deployment Model (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS), Migration Method (Rehost/Redeploy/Replatform/Rewrite/Retain), Cloud consumption costs, License Portability or Strategy (This is generally ignored but it plays a critical role during Cloud migration)
5. Target Cloud Reference Architecture If your organization is planning to develop a new application which has a dependency on existing applications or resources (Database, storage, authentication), it is worth assessing those dependencies and their impact on performance, security, scalability, and costs
6. RoI for Cloud portfolio migration for the next 1-5 years
7. Expected Cloud benefits in terms of RoI, Agility, and Flexibility (It is very difficult to quantify Agility and Flexibility but there are ways)

A Cloud assessment gives a lot of insights into current enterprise landscape (Infra and Applications) and helps enterprises make informed decisions. It is very important to use as much automation and tools as possible.

Capgemini has its own proprietary tool for qualitative analysis plus tie-ups with industry standard tools to do end to end assessment in an industrialized manner. Capgemini’s proprietary qualitative assessment tool has inbuilt and customizable Cloud decision algorithms to help automate Cloud decisions. After successfully executing assessments for multiple clients, it also has a benchmarking data which is very vital for decision making.

In Ireland, we are in the midst of a number of different Cloud Assessments and have executed quite interesting assessments. It’s a fulfilling experience to be a partner with clients at the beginning of their Cloud journeys.

If you are starting to think about what this will mean for your organisation, Sogeti can help you to take the first concrete steps towards getting the right answers and solutions for your organisation. Contact us today to start the conversation.