The hidden benefits of mobility & cross-platform
Migrating to the cloud is a major project. As an IT professional, you may need to justify it against other priorities. As part of your application migration best practices, talk to the different decision makers to ensure you understand their individual needs. Address their concerns in the proposal and show how migrating the application(s) to the cloud not only solves their problem, but presents them with a number of additional business benefits. These could include:
- Increase mobile productivity by empowering employees to work from anywhere, on any device without having to remote into a slow VPN.
- Deliver software products and legacy applications to customers via the Web decreasing their IT management costs and creating a better end user experience.
- Justify a move to thin clients or a BYOD policy increasing mobility and convenience for employees cost, while decreasing costs.
- Leverage powerful cloud tools, such as data analytics, reporting, addons etc.
Application Migration Best Practices:
Cloud app delivery cost calculation
A critical component of application migration best practices is having a clear understanding of costs. When calculating the total cost of ownership (TCO) of cloud app delivery solutions, it is important to make note of the following variables:
- Number of simultaneous users that may need the software at any given time.
- Product’s cost saving capabilities: cloud servers need to have elasticity & power management to avoid high cloud CPU bills at the end of the month.
- Average CPU & RAM consumption of the applications to migrate.
- If a single CPU can serve a few users simultaneously (which is typically the case for non-graphical applications), then it is imperative to choose a solution which can leverage each cloud CPU for more than just one user at the same time.
Measuring application average CPU & RAM consumption
To calculate the average CPU and RAM consumption of your legacy application, simply connect to a Windows Server where the application is installed and run it as a typical user would. While the application is active, log into the same server as an administrator and launch the Task Manager. Go to the “Users” tab, and you will be able to see the CPU and RAM amount consumed by the entire session –including the application and its surrounding Windows dependencies. By multiplying the obtained CPU by the number of logical CPUs on the server, you will obtain the CPU percentage of the application per user session. The total amount of RAM per user session is directly displayed in this screen.
We hope you are enjoying our four-part series on migrating applications to the cloud. If you missed one or more of the articles, please click the links below to view them:
Post 1: Migrating Complex Applications to the Cloud Can Eliminate Promised Cost Savings
Post 2: Migrating Applications to the Cloud: Lift and Shift or Re-architecture
Post 4: Migrating Applications to the Cloud: What’s the Right Solution?
Showing business value and costs are a core part of application migration best practices. What else have you included?