Determine the framework for your transformation
Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2025 5:51 am
Migrating applications to the cloud is an omnipresent topic in the daily life of all IT departments.
It is difficult not to resist the tempting offers from cloud solution providers who promise cost reduction, scalability, innovation, security or even resilience. In our experience, the advantages offered by cloud solutions are undeniable if and only if their use is the result of several stages of reflection.
This work must be carried out upstream to end up defining an appropriate strategy and thus ensure that your switch to the cloud is a success.
4 key steps to move forward on the right trajectory
These steps of reflection are done in a top-down manner, starting with a global view of the ecosystem in which you work and ending with the specifics of your applications. Depending on your starting point and the transformation strategy you want to implement, your applications will have a different migration target.
1. Focus on your existing
You are unique! Due to your history and whatever your size, you have your own organization and operational model. You have hosting capacities and technical human resources related to this activity. Perhaps you have invested in infrastructure to install your servers.
On the contrary, you may already be committed to external hosting for all or part of your needs. You may also have opted for support from one or more partners to strengthen your internal capacities. Are these partners ready to support you on cloud solutions?
Does the use of managed services allow you to modify your operational model and reduce the need for external technical operating services? Are your metrology tools suitable for a switch to the cloud? As you can see, this analysis work is essential to define an appropriate strategy.
Cloud adoption should be seen as a lever for modernization and acceleration of digital transformation and not as a single technical challenge. The transition to the cloud requires a process of acculturation of teams. It is preferable to consider support that secures this transition both technologically and organizationally.
List the regulatory and security constraints
Just as your application lives in an organizational framework, it also lives in a regulatory framework. This context has an impact on the services that you will be able to use to switch to the cloud. The GDPR is probably the regulation that applies to the greatest number of applications. The vast majority of available cloud services comply with the requirements of the GDPR. In the same way, you may have constraints on the localization of your application data. Here too, cloud providers have invested to make their services available in several regions in Europe. On the other hand, certain areas of activity will require compliance with more advanced standards or certifications such as HDS for healthcare or PCI-DSS for the banking world. In the public sector, the Cloud at the Center of the State doctrine directs institutions towards SecNumCloud qualified solutions when certain criteria are met. These regulatory frameworks will condition the catalog of services that can be used to host your applications. The NIS and NIS 2 directives will also bring certain constraints on the services used and their implementations.
Map your application park
Another important step: mapping your applications. This exercise is essential to comprehensively identify the specific features of your application portfolio: resources consumed, type of technologies used, cloud maturity level, connectivity and adhesion with external solutions, obsolescence status, service usage, etc. This information is very often known by employees working on projects on a daily basis but is rarely consolidated.
All of this collected data will be used to categorize your applications according to different criteria such as their adherence to technologies that are difficult to find in the cloud (such as shared NAS-type storage), their degree of containerization or even the seasonality of application traffic.
We haven't talked about governance yet. Now that you have mapped your starting point, it is relevant to define it. You must define the targets of your transformation, the resources needed to achieve it and also the means to ensure control. This may seem like a complex exercise but rest assured, it is very likely that what you had initially imagined is not exactly what saudi arabia telegram data you are going to implement. Stay flexible and don't close doors too quickly.
Identify the expected benefits of migrating to the cloud
As mentioned earlier, cloud adoption shouldn’t be just a technical topic; it will involve many more people than you might have initially planned. The goal may be as simple as freeing up resources from aging infrastructure or reducing your digital footprint and associated costs.
This is potentially also the opportunity you have been waiting for to modernize your organization and your internal skills! The new services available on the cloud open up new development methods such as the microservices approach. The use of managed services can be an opportunity to streamline your teams' operating costs or also to review your recovery and business continuity plans by benefiting from the native resilience of these solutions.
List the resources you need to achieve these targets
To achieve these ambitions, you will need resources, human and technical, adapted to these new solutions. The idea is not to destroy your foundations to rebuild everything but to find the best trajectory to keep your strengths while benefiting from the contributions of the cloud.
It is difficult not to resist the tempting offers from cloud solution providers who promise cost reduction, scalability, innovation, security or even resilience. In our experience, the advantages offered by cloud solutions are undeniable if and only if their use is the result of several stages of reflection.
This work must be carried out upstream to end up defining an appropriate strategy and thus ensure that your switch to the cloud is a success.
4 key steps to move forward on the right trajectory
These steps of reflection are done in a top-down manner, starting with a global view of the ecosystem in which you work and ending with the specifics of your applications. Depending on your starting point and the transformation strategy you want to implement, your applications will have a different migration target.
1. Focus on your existing
You are unique! Due to your history and whatever your size, you have your own organization and operational model. You have hosting capacities and technical human resources related to this activity. Perhaps you have invested in infrastructure to install your servers.
On the contrary, you may already be committed to external hosting for all or part of your needs. You may also have opted for support from one or more partners to strengthen your internal capacities. Are these partners ready to support you on cloud solutions?
Does the use of managed services allow you to modify your operational model and reduce the need for external technical operating services? Are your metrology tools suitable for a switch to the cloud? As you can see, this analysis work is essential to define an appropriate strategy.
Cloud adoption should be seen as a lever for modernization and acceleration of digital transformation and not as a single technical challenge. The transition to the cloud requires a process of acculturation of teams. It is preferable to consider support that secures this transition both technologically and organizationally.
List the regulatory and security constraints
Just as your application lives in an organizational framework, it also lives in a regulatory framework. This context has an impact on the services that you will be able to use to switch to the cloud. The GDPR is probably the regulation that applies to the greatest number of applications. The vast majority of available cloud services comply with the requirements of the GDPR. In the same way, you may have constraints on the localization of your application data. Here too, cloud providers have invested to make their services available in several regions in Europe. On the other hand, certain areas of activity will require compliance with more advanced standards or certifications such as HDS for healthcare or PCI-DSS for the banking world. In the public sector, the Cloud at the Center of the State doctrine directs institutions towards SecNumCloud qualified solutions when certain criteria are met. These regulatory frameworks will condition the catalog of services that can be used to host your applications. The NIS and NIS 2 directives will also bring certain constraints on the services used and their implementations.
Map your application park
Another important step: mapping your applications. This exercise is essential to comprehensively identify the specific features of your application portfolio: resources consumed, type of technologies used, cloud maturity level, connectivity and adhesion with external solutions, obsolescence status, service usage, etc. This information is very often known by employees working on projects on a daily basis but is rarely consolidated.
All of this collected data will be used to categorize your applications according to different criteria such as their adherence to technologies that are difficult to find in the cloud (such as shared NAS-type storage), their degree of containerization or even the seasonality of application traffic.
We haven't talked about governance yet. Now that you have mapped your starting point, it is relevant to define it. You must define the targets of your transformation, the resources needed to achieve it and also the means to ensure control. This may seem like a complex exercise but rest assured, it is very likely that what you had initially imagined is not exactly what saudi arabia telegram data you are going to implement. Stay flexible and don't close doors too quickly.
Identify the expected benefits of migrating to the cloud
As mentioned earlier, cloud adoption shouldn’t be just a technical topic; it will involve many more people than you might have initially planned. The goal may be as simple as freeing up resources from aging infrastructure or reducing your digital footprint and associated costs.
This is potentially also the opportunity you have been waiting for to modernize your organization and your internal skills! The new services available on the cloud open up new development methods such as the microservices approach. The use of managed services can be an opportunity to streamline your teams' operating costs or also to review your recovery and business continuity plans by benefiting from the native resilience of these solutions.
List the resources you need to achieve these targets
To achieve these ambitions, you will need resources, human and technical, adapted to these new solutions. The idea is not to destroy your foundations to rebuild everything but to find the best trajectory to keep your strengths while benefiting from the contributions of the cloud.