How to prioritize the candidates for your cloud transformation

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.