Unprecedented changes in today's market environment require companies to react quickly and become more dependent on technology. Technologies that reside in the cloud enable companies to focus on delivering faster value to customers.
Moving applications and workloads to the cloud is part of most enterprises’ agenda. It can help your organization reduce cost, allow for more flexibility, increase reliability, and reduce risk.
When business applications are moved to the cloud there are few strategies that can be implemented, among them:
- Lift-and-Shift (so the apps are not cloud native apps, rather just hosted in the cloud)
- Partial refactoring of the applications to leverage several cloud native capabilities
- Complete rewrite of the app, to make it a cloud native app
However, picking up the right apps to move to the cloud can be challenging. The process requires high overhead to navigate the vast portfolio of application, and is usually based on incomplete data, leading to delayed decisions that are based on partial data.
So how do you select the tight business applications to move to the cloud? There are certain criteria that can help you chose the right apps:
- Are the apps built on legacy code base or rather with modern technology that is supported by the cloud vendor?
- Do you already have a version of the app that fits to the cloud (for example micro services architecture)
- Are there any data confidentiality considerations that are specific to the app?
The new Application Portfolio Management (APM) Cloud Assessment, released as part of the ServiceNow Q4 store release can help you assess your entire business application portfolio, and to evaluate a business application for its cloud migration readiness.
To get the cloud assessment option in the Application Portfolio Management, you must install the Application Portfolio Management Cloud Assessment application from the ServiceNow Store.
As part of cloud assessment, multiple cloud assessment indicators are provided to help you to evaluate business applications for their cloud migration readiness. Some of the indicators are:
- Strategic Importance
- Data Classification
- Business Criticality
- Cloud Readiness
- Use Base
All these indicators can be fulfilled by leveraging ServiceNow platform capabilities for assessments, and scheduled data certifications, so that application owners can contribute to knowledge of their applications status.
And last, an easy bubble chart enables you to objectively compare the readiness of your business applications and serve as a baseline to decide on the right apps to move to the cloud.
Leveraging the new APM cloud assessment capability together with other ServiceNow tools, like the IT Operations Management (ITOM) Cloud Migration Assessment , can help you in your cloud migration journey.
