“Kees, you said we want to be an organization that changes the world and to accomplish that goal we need to grow our team, optimize our organization and improve our cost structure. Focussing on our digital strategy along the way.”

“Well, you are right Carlo. We need to become a data-driven organization that leverages the newest technology developments, so we can keep growing, reducing cost in the long term. An Enterprise Migration to the public cloud will drive these goals in the coming years.” 

“Sure, sure, we already did our research and the decision has been made. We know we want to go all-in on one public cloud provider to leverage their platform innovations as much as possible. It's important to keep our exit strategy well defined and have a calculated risk on vendor lock-in. We are clear on what our business drivers to go cloud are. But how do we proceed? How can we figure out how to migrate all of our 536 applications and where should they go?” 

6R-strategy for migrating apps to public cloud

In this case the help of the well-known 6R-strategy would be of great benefit. So let’s proceed with our “real world” example and see what this could look like in case you want to start the daunting journey of migrating your organization to a public cloud like AWS or Azure. If you are new to the 6R-strategy, you can read about it here. To refresh your memory, the 6R’s according to AWS are Rehosting, Replatforming, Repurchasing, Refactoring/-architecting, Retire and Retain. 

6 steps to access the application landscape 

When you are reading about the 6R's in the AWS Migration Whitepaper it can still seem a bit fuzzy and maybe you are not sure how you can do the analysis yourself. At CloudNation we’ve simplified the process by making a compact checklist that you can use to start off on the right foot, without spending a year of resources on cloud due diligence. To make it super practical we are going to use three applications as a start for a company-wide migration. 

Action plan for choosing a 6R strategy per application: 

• Step 1: Inspired by the template from this blog, make a central document (simple database) for your application portfolio analysis. For example, use a shared Excel document (synchronized in the cloud) for this.   
• Step 2: Get a list of all applications: which application can be found on which server and who is the responsible application owner. Tooling can do most of the work for you. Import this information into your central document. 
• Step 3: Use criteria to help you decide which strategy of the 6R’s will be used for a specific application. Modify the columns in the example template to reflect the criteria that apply to your organization/situation. 
• Step 4: Based on the information gathered in the criteria columns, make a new column stating the preferred R strategy. Discuss with relevant stakeholders. Involve them to create buy-in. 
• Step 5: Check the feasibility of the preferred migration strategy. Add additional columns with the feasibility checks and fill them out with your application stakeholders.  
• Step 6: Decide on a migration strategy for your application in the last column. 
  
  

Use the table to decide 

This table is to be used as a starting point for a decision-making framework tailored to your organization. Every situation is different, it always depends on your needs and goals. Use your final sheet to have constructive discussions with important stakeholders, so that the outcome will be a well thought-out-decision, made together. Use this table to match the right migration strategy and deployment model for each application that you want to have migrated. 

(click on image to enlarge)

While Kees and Carlo gave each other a high five after doing their research through the 6R strategy, they knew this is where the fun (or ‘unpleasantness’ for some stakeholders ;-)) of migrating to a new exiting platform still has to start.

Back to reality, are you in the same stage of your cloud journey? Are you leading change and do you need an experienced cloud partner? We at CloudNation can help you with that. Let’s have a (virtual) coffee and talk about it.