What we see with many companies that want to move to the cloud, is that they don’t know what to start with.

Simple. But crucial.

To prioritize the candidates for your cloud transformation is crucial because it means that you can transform your business applications and servers in the right order. Which in turn means that you can benefit from your cloud journey sooner.

For cloud migration – and other digital transformations – there are a few introductory questions that come before the technical discussions.

Where is a good place to start?

Where does it hurt the most?

Where will it be most fruitful to make an effort first?

To successfully transform, it is vital to know your existing platform in detail.

How to get to that level of knowledge?

Start with a comprehensive inventory of your digital estate.

Don’t fret!

Yes, it used to be a hassle to gain an overview of your IT infrastructure (and frankly impossible to gain a complete overview).

But with the advanced algorithms, we sport today, it’s a pretty simple process.

An intelligent software will give you a complete inventory mapping of your entire digital estate.

In no time.

Automatically, of course.

If you lack insight into what systems and applications are critical and interdependent, it is difficult to make informed decisions about how to prioritize in the cloud migration process.

But if you do an automatic inventory mapping of your entire infrastructure, you get a complete overview of all servers, operating systems, and applications.

Intelligent services can automatically discover all servers, systems, and applications to provide an exhaustive inventory mapping of connections and interdependencies.

(Full disclaimer: We provide a service that does just that. A pretty good one, if I may say so.)

When you gain that overview of your digital estate and insights into the interdependencies within your IT infrastructure, then you can plan your cloud transformation with the right prioritizations.

So begin with an automatic inventory mapping.

Do you know how your business-critical applications are connected in your IT infrastructure?

Or are you fiddling with individual servers?

We worked to come up with a method that helps you go from a server view to an application view of your IT infrastructure.

To allow you to transform applications instead of individual servers.

So we have developed a service, that automatically groups business applications in the IT infrastructure.

A business application consists of one or more servers that deliver an application.

Examples of business applications are a finance system, a CRM solution, an intranet, or a sales management system.

It can also be of more technical character such as IT system management, patch management, or print servers.

Mugato does an advanced analysis of the network traffic between servers, server configuration, and the software installed.

Then, the algorithms group the servers based on this information.

This enables you to manage the servers in clusters and make decisions based on the context of application interdependencies and system functionality, instead of fiddling around with individual servers.

For planning a digital transformation process, this means that instead of looking at, let’s say, 800 servers, you are looking at 800 servers modeled into 87 business interdependencies.

So instead of juggling hundreds of servers, your task becomes finding out what business application clusters are most critical to transform.

With this method, you simplify the transformation drastically, by boiling your entire infrastructure down to the systems and applications present.

Figure out what systems you need to prioritize in your cloud transformation plan.

Go from hundreds of servers to the two applications, you should start with.

Rightsizing isn’t a cloud-specific activity, but a cloud migration lends itself very well to rightsizing.

A cloud transformation can motivate a rightsizing process.

What’s the motivation?

One.

(The obvious one.)

Because cloud is pay-as-you-go, being rightsized is key for keeping your costs clear-cut.

Two.

(The uncomfortable surprise, that you want to avoid.)

If you move your IT to the cloud with its current configurations, without giving a thought to rightsizing, your costs in the cloud will likely skyrocket.

On the other hand, if your environment is rightsized before you move it to the cloud, you will only pay for what you need. From the very beginning.

Our partners, who facilitate digital transformations in large organizations, agree that there is a shiny opportunity for rightsizing when entering into a digital transformation.

At that time, you are already doing focused work on the nitty-gritty of your infrastructure, so the option to rightsize while you’re at it might seem obvious.

For some, it’s a no-brainer to include this activity, because they already have a practice of continuous rightsizing. But to be honest, we rarely see that.

Most organizations have a (scarily) laissez-faire approach to their capacity fit. If you are in an organization like most, you are overprovisioning immensely.

That means you’ll be paying for capacity that you don’t need.

In the cloud, those unnecessary costs can be severe.

Most who choose to include rightsizing as a preliminary activity of a digital transformation, experience a visible impact on the transformation that follows and how it lands. Proper preparation is the key to a successful transformation.

If you rightsize when you enter into a cloud transformation, you can ensure your capacity fit from the very beginning.

That being said, rightsizing is not a one-hit discipline.

Staying rightsized can be a continuous activity.

You might want to keep an eye on your capacity fit.

Perhaps introduce capacity management as a continuous part of finOps.

(Cloud finOps, if you’re into the lingo.)

Worried that this will be another reoccurring resource-heavy activity on your table?

Automate the process.

Choose a service that does ongoing automatic monitoring of your IT environment.

Intelligent services can help you stay updated on your capacity and resource utilization.

Ensure your capacity fit on an ongoing basis.

Then you can sleep tight knowing that your cloud costs won’t run wild.

We provide a (pretty clever) service that supports you in all of the above.

This solution provides actionable data for your rightsizing process and helps you ensure your capacity fit in the future.

Here are two approaches to rightsizing based on functionality/features we provide with Mugato:

This is a resource utilization bubble chart.

It visualizes the servers in your IT infrastructure based on resource utilization.

What you see here, is that a few databases do use a lot of resources.

It (obviously) makes sense to allocate a lot of resources to those.

But what we also see, is that the majority are tiny machines.

That’s the multitude of little light blue bubbles on the left (in the last part of the animation, that is.)

These are probably worth consolidating.

Simple as that.

This visualization (top graph) is an overview of CPU utilization.

This data visualization shows you where there is an opportunity to cut allocated CPU on a large scale, and where you should turn the knobs on individual servers.

A way for you to see the actual utilization on your servers, and what you can rightsize without losing on performance.

If you want to be precise, consider the percentile.

What has the peak been for 95% of server lifetime?

What has the peak been for 99% of server lifetime?

For instance, the servers represented by the top spikes can be sized roughly after the 99 percentile. But on the bottom of the same line, you see quite a lot of servers, that don’t even get a spike on that graph. They simply use very little of the allocated CPU.

When you look at that bottom line, it’s pretty remarkable how much you can rightsize.

Without losing performance.

A data visualization like this can help you find a better balance between performance and utilization, so you don’t overprovision.