Cloud Assessment

Workload information

Please enter the following information about the workload:

Onsite workload description

Please select the description that most closely matches the current environment:

Servers used to support the workload are (degree of standardization & virtualization):

The operating system supporting the workload is (degree of standardization & currency):

The age of the application (architecture) is:

The integration of the workload with applications & data external to the workload is:

The storage supporting the workload is (degree of standardization & virtualization):

Placement drivers

What are the key drivers impacting workload placement?

Workload drivers

Demand volatility

Does demand for the workload have unpredictable spikes or peaks?

Does the workload have external users? (Frequently customers or suppliers drive unpredictable demand.)

Demand periodicity

Does the demand for the workload have predicable spikes or peaks?

Is the demand for the application driven by business process that have a predictable cycle? (e.g. monthly close, annual close, etc.)

Rapid growth

Is the demand for the workload growing much faster than most of the rest of your workloads?

Is it technically or operationally difficult to keep sufficient capacity on site to support the workload?

Temporary workloads

Is the workload temporary? Examples: application development, test and quality assurance, new ventures, or other test activities.

Do you expect the demand for the workload to diminish in the near future?

Rapid provisioning

Does the workload require the rapid provisioning for server and/or storage?

Are there other rapid provisioning drivers? Workloads that may have rapid provisioning drivers include things like business intelligence, market analysis, and other business decision making applications. Frequently this type of demand is driven by business or IT professionals.

Disaster Recovery/Multiple Instance

Is distance and physical separation between users and IT (servers/storage) important?

Business drivers

Business agility

Does the business unit using or supported by the workload require agility?

Frequently the pace of markets and competitors can drive the need for agility, but any rapidly changing environment can make agility important to success

Business availability

Does the workload have critical availability requirements to support business needs?

Is it possible that a cloud or hosted service would offer availability improvements?

IT staff & skills

Could the IT resources assigned to the workload could be deployed more productively - refocused on higher-value activities?

Does the organization have a need for additional business analysts, process experts, or line of business relationship managers that could be have admin work off-loaded?

Could cloud or hosting service providers offer focused expertise that would help with any staff/skills deficiencies?

Financial drivers

Capital expense pressure

To what extent is IT under pressure to reduce capital expenditures?

Do you need to reduce over-provisioning and expending capital into capacity for future growth or as insurance against unpredictable demand?

Is the infrastructure supporting the workload is at a financial decision point (e.g. a scheduled hardware refresh)?

Operating expense pressure

To what extent is IT under pressure to reduce operating expense and to run the workload more inexpensively?

Does your SW license management and fee structure drive a desire reduce software expenses (maintenance, support, etc.)?

IT migration drivers

Infrastructure Migration / Supportability

Is the current infrastructure difficult to support? (Are there plans to upgrade or refresh it in the near term?)

Does the cloud or hosting offer an opportunity to migrate off of proprietary technology and standardize the infrastructure supporting the workload?

Does the cloud or hosting offer an opportunity to reduce vendor lock-in?

Solution availability

Are there SaaS solutions available that would make migration to new applications make sense for this workload?

Is the workload built on legacy architectures?

New development

Does the workload represent new development that could easily be migrated to a cloud or hosted environment?

Considerations for migration

Review of key consideration that may negatively impact your ability to migrate the workload to cloud:

Application Architecture

What do you believe is the impact of your application architecture on migration to the cloud?

To what extent is the workload built on non-standard infrastructure (often directly related to the age of the application architecture)?

To what extent is the workload supported by infrastructure that does not meet the common standards? (e.g. Display: browser based, Storage: object oriented and Operating Systems: mainstream Linux, UNIX & Windows)

Integration requirements

What do you believe is the impact of the integration requirements of the workload on migration to the cloud?

Are the integration requirements complete understood and documented?

Are the processes, applications, and data are significantly dependent on resources external to the workload?

Do you have a standard application integration approach (better than spaghetti code) that will work for applications in the cloud?

Potential performance issues

What do you believe is the impact of the workload's performance on migration to the cloud?

Is there substantial transaction oriented processing (local vs. Internet performance issues)?

Does the workload share data with other workloads that are not candidates?

Security & privacy concerns

What do you believe is the impact of the workload's security & privacy requirements on migration to the cloud?

Are the requirements for security & privacy completely understood and documented?

Unique management requirements

What do you believe is the impact of the workload's management requirements on migration to the cloud?

Does the application have unique compliance requirements – e.g. WORM storage, etc.?

Will you have the ability to create a audit trail for the data that meets chain of custody requirements?

Will you have the ability to locate data and support eDiscovery in the cloud?

Do you require the ability to chargeback (or show back or some other funding mechanism) in the cloud? Cloud will drive substantial changes to most internal approaches to charge that you may need to adjust for.

IT governance

What do you believe the impact of your approach to IT Governance will have on the migration to the cloud?

Do you have strong IT service management processes? Weak IT service management, no SLA, and weak governance in place for the workload are indications that the workload is not ready for the cloud.

Do you have established organization policies for deploying, managing, archiving and deleting its applications and data? When moving to the cloud, it is vital that the cloud provider support those policies – thus it is vital that you understand them. (e.g. VM lifecycle management, application lifecycle management, etc.)