How to Modernize Traditional Enterprise Applications in the Cloud

Introduction

A better path to cloud for your most valuable applications

Research from Gartner: A High-Level Framework for Planning Your Migration to Public Cloud Services

About Skytap

Gartner Newsletter Q3 20172

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Accelerating Cloud Innovation with Hybrid Applications

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Introduction

Thank you for taking the time to explore this unique collection of Gartner research and Skytap resources detailing how best to modernize traditional enterprise applications in the cloud.

In August 2006, Amazon posted a one-paragraph announcement that it was launching something called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to bring computing power to the cloud. EC2 joined its recently-launched cloud storage service, S3, to set in motion what would become AWS. The rest is widely-covered history.

What’s been less covered is a segment of the market that AWS does not focus on — the thousands of mission-critical applications that most people thought would always be stuck in the datacenter. It’s not as fun to talk about those “on-premises,” back-office apps that are the heart of an enterprise’s operations.

Skytap solves a messy, urgent challenge for enterprise IT. We all know AWS, Azure, and the other hyperscale providers are compelling services for building and running new cloud-native applications. But these services combined will still be less than 25 percent of total IT spend in 2020, leaving more than 75 percent of IT budgets tied up in mission-critical applications trapped in the data center.

Skytap frees those traditional applications from the data center and brings them into our cloud. Once there, our unique environments approach enables companies to modernize the way they manage their infrastructure, evolve development

with agile and DevOps processes, and extend application architectures with new cloud services. Skytap Cloud enables customers to combine the best of their traditional apps with cloud services to create hybrid applications best suited for ongoing modernization. The end result is that our customers increase business agility and maximize existing investments.

If you continue reading, you’ll find actionable insights and specific guidance on your own cloud journey. We look forward to the opportunity to work together on increasing your organization’s agility and, ultimately, strengthening your ability to innovate.

Thank you,Thor CulverhouseCEO

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A better path to cloud for your most valuable applications

Business leaders everywhere know we’re in a digital economy. Organizations must rapidly deliver goods and services through software to compete. Doing so requires a modern approach to software delivery that leverages cloud, agile and DevOps processes, and new system architectures. This transition enables faster, safer, and more efficient application development, which is the cornerstone of on-demand digital services that customers expect.

Cloud is the foundation of digital transformation. Cloud delivers agility, flexibility, and scale for the development and operations of both new, cloud-native applications, and the traditional applications that enterprises depend on to run their businesses. Gartner highlights the role of public cloud in digital business as follows, “Public cloud services are essential for emerging digital business use cases, next-generation applications and initiatives like the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the public cloud is also a viable hosting alternative for traditional enterprise applications.” (2017 Planning Guide for Cloud Computing).

The challenge with the latter point is that traditional enterprise applications weren’t built for the cloud and can’t be easily migrated to take advantage of its capabilities. These core business systems often have complex dependencies on physical infrastructure and on-premises resources.

Meanwhile, standard clouds are designed for cloud-native development built to the specifics of those clouds. That leaves mission-critical workloads trapped in the datacenter. Gartner underscores the gap between a desire to implement cloud and actual execution, stating “Through 2017, more than 80% of CIOs will be pressured by business management to evaluate migrating their data center to cloud IaaS. Through 2017, more than 50% of organizations that evaluate large-scale data center migrations to cloud IaaS will decide to remain with their existing infrastructure.” (Three Journeys Define Migrating a Data Center to Cloud Infrastructure as a Service)

Clarifying the Primary Approaches to Cloud Adoption

Enterprises need a way to introduce modern development approaches to their traditional applications so they can preserve existing investment, while modernizing core systems in parallel to new development. Unfortunately, standard clouds are not an effective solution, which may be one reason why a Gartner survey found that, “Through 2020, more than 85% of enterprises adopting a cloud-first strategy will continue to host business-critical applications in traditional data center environments.” (Deliver Data Center Modernization Using Three Cloud-Complementary Approaches)

There are four generally understood routes to cloud for existing applications – rehost, refactor, rewrite, or replace with SaaS. In “A High-Level Framework for Planning Your Migration to Public Cloud Services”, which you’ll find following this editorial, Gartner clarifies these processes as:

A. Rehost to Hyperscale Cloud

B. Refactor for Public Cloud

C. Rehost to a Niche Public Cloud

D. Replace With SaaS Offering

E. Rewrite for Public Cloud

Wayne Morris, CMO, Skytap

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Let’s briefly examine each of these approaches:

A. Rehost to Hyperscale Cloud: Often espoused as the easiest approach, in reality it may not be easy at all. Attempting to rehost complex enterprise applications dependent on underlying datacenter infrastructure, middleware, database architectures, and/or network components or protocols is frequently much more difficult in practice.

B. Refactor for Public Cloud – We see enterprise customers succeed with this approach most frequently when they first rehost the application, and then refactor components of the application over time in-line with business needs.

C. Rehost to a Niche Public Cloud – This is the fastest path to cloud for traditional applications, provided the selected cloud can support the applications’ complexities and dependencies by delivering an exact replica of the datacenter.

D. Replace With SaaS Offering – We see this approach work for standard processes that have an established SaaS equivalent. However,

many traditional applications are unique to the specific company or vertical industry, and provide significant competitive advantage, making replacement difficult or impossible.

E. Rewrite for Public Cloud – As Gartner writes, “Rewriting can be expensive and difficult” (A High-Level Framework for Planning Your Migration to Public Cloud Services) and we’ve seen enterprises go through significant time, cost, and pain attempting to rewrite mission-critical applications for the cloud, often for only incremental benefits.

So, while enterprise IT leaders know cloud is critical to increasing velocity for mission-critical systems, the choices for doing so are not clear or straightforward. Further muddying the road ahead is that rehosting, refactoring, and, to a degree, replacing traditional applications have primarily been associated with cost savings and operational efficiency. But today’s IT leaders know the stakes are much higher than reducing OpEx – the real goal is greater agility through modernization. Gartner data found that: “IT modernization is the leading driver of both public and private cloud adoption, surpassing cost savings, innovation and

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agility benefits as stand-alone outcomes.” (Market Trends: Cloud Adoption Trends Favor Public Cloud With a Hybrid Twist)

Combining the Best of Traditional Applications with New Cloud Capabilities

Enterprises need a better way forward to modernize traditional applications that enhances the capabilities and value of these systems through modern technology, processes, and architecture. Embracing cloud and agile development processes is the most direct path to this kind of innovation -- an approach that also leverages years of investment and development in traditional applications.

Skytap Cloud is the IaaS platform for modernizing traditional applications with increased agility, inherent cloud capabilities, and new cloud services. Combining the best of core business applications with new cloud capabilities creates hybrid applications that bridge legacy systems with modern development processes. These hybrid applications combine traditional components with cloud-native architectures and services and often run in multiple locations. This approach enables enterprises to accelerate innovation and apply the

benefits of cloud computing to their existing core business applications, extending their investments and maximizing ROI. Skytap Cloud delivers a better, faster path for enterprises to innovate by modernizing the infrastructure, processes, and architecture supporting our customers’ most important applications.

Skytap Cloud’s unique value is two-fold. First, our environments act like ‘virtual datacenters’ and replicate an application’s complete datacenter environment – including networking topologies. This capability migrates traditional applications to our cloud fundamentally unchanged, and in much less time than with standard clouds. We also provide differentiated VPN solutions that securely connect applications back to workloads or components that will remain on-premises.

Once in our cloud, enterprises can extend the value of their traditional applications by using Skytap Cloud environments to improve agility and accelerate modernization. Our environments-first approach combines infrastructure, networking, storage, OS, software, and memory state into a single unit -- the fundamental unit of work in Skytap Cloud. These environments can be provisioned, cloned, shared, suspended, and deleted on-demand. Application teams get self-service resources needed for agile and DevOps, while IT maintains control over costs. Development and testing is freed from on-premises constraints, enabling work to be processed in parallel and with maximum operational efficiency. The result is faster release cycles with more new features, higher quality software, and lower IT costs.

How Skytap Cloud Aligns with Leading Cloud Adoption Strategies

Skytap Cloud’s capabilities make it a compelling solution for rehosting, refactoring, or rewriting traditional enterprise applications – all at the best pace for each individual business:

1. Easily rehost applications to our global public cloud to reduce costs and free business-critical applications from the datacenter. Modernize infrastructure management with elastic capacity for production, as well as self-service availability of complete production-ready environments for development, test, training, and pre-production purposes.

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2. Further increase agility by modernizing development processes using multiple self-service environments to support parallel dev/test teams and our REST API to integrate with a wide range of continuous integration and delivery tools.

3. Selectively refactor specific application components at your own pace and in-line with business needs by utilizing cloud services to modernize application architecture.

4. Extend modernization by rewriting critical application components over time, or augment existing components with new cloud services to create hybrid applications ideally suited for more rapid development.

Our differentiated cloud service for modernizing enterprises’ most critical applications is one of the primary reasons we’re IBM’s leading cloud partner and recently established a go-to-market partnership with VMware. These relationships and our ability to securely connect to other

standard clouds and on-premises datacenters enable effective hybrid- and multi-cloud strategies. This also means customers can use ‘the right cloud for the right job’ by modernizing traditional applications with Skytap Cloud, while net-new development takes place in standard clouds. Consider this approach in the context of Gartner’s guidance to: “Choose a strategic vendor, and optimize procurement and staff training accordingly; be open to using alternatives for some projects when justified by a business objective that can be achieved only in an alternative cloud.” (A High-Level Framework for Planning Your Migration to Public Cloud Services).

Accelerating innovation to rapidly deliver goods and services through software requires a cloud foundation and hybrid approach to traditional applications. Read this overview of Skytap Cloud to learn how we make the most of your existing investments, while simultaneously increasing agility with new cloud services. You can also take a virtual tour of Skytap Cloud to see how we enable you to modernize core applications using the best approach – and pace – for your business.

Source: Skytap

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Research from Gartner

A High-Level Framework for Planning Your Migration to Public Cloud Services

Introduction

Interest in public cloud migration has steadily increased at a rate exceeding 60% year over year since 2015, according to Gartner client interaction data. We are, in 2017, experiencing a massive push into the cloud, with even the most conservative customers aggressively researching best practices and methodologies for planning and executing a migration.

Gartner research for setting cloud strategy and understanding some of the basic choices to be made during migration is heavily accessed. However, there is one remaining question posed by IT leaders in this context that is not addressed: “Do you have a framework or process or methodology to help me plan my migration?” Gartner has deep research in this area, but it is targeted at technical professionals that will be doing the day-to-day and long-term work to effect the migration; it is typically too detailed to meet the personal needs of IT application leaders. However, these leaders still want an overview of the process by which to guide teams along the journey.

This research specifically targets IT application leaders who want a more detailed overview of the migration process. It should be used as a bridge between a cloud strategy and the execution details of a project to effect the migration, as shown in Figure 1.

Analysis

Do Not Attempt Migration Without First Having a StrategyA migration plan is not a cloud strategy! Gartner clients frequently request a discussion on cloud migration and do not have a cloud strategy in place. Or they ask for a consultation on cloud strategy and bring their migration plan. Many times, the cloud strategy may assume migration, but the data center strategy does not concur. A comprehensive IT strategy serves to unify all cloud-related decisions, so that they have a common and defensible rationale grounded in achieving predetermined business outcomes and objectives.

Migrating large numbers of workloads from an on-premises data center to the public cloud requires careful planning. Although detailed methodologies are available, many IT application leaders don’t know where to begin. Use this framework to bridge the gap between strategy and execution.

Key Challenges

• Many IT leaders attempt public cloud migration in the absence of a vetted cloud strategy or without satisfying important prerequisites, which lead to suboptimal outcomes or outright failure.

• Public cloud migrations are complex due to the number and kinds of workloads to be migrated, and the number of possible destinations and transformations.

• Although best practices exist for planning and implementing public cloud migrations, they must be adapted for each specific situation to be successful.

• Detailed migration methodologies are available from Gartner, but this information is too detailed for IT leaders to consume and act upon efficiently. IT application leaders need a high-level, formal framework by which they can guide their teams along the migration journey.

Recommendations

To improve the chance of a successful cloud migration, IT application leaders responsible for planning public cloud migrations must:

• Ensure their data center and cloud strategies are consistent in indicating the need for migration, and that foundational elements for successful migration are in place.

• Use this framework to plan and execute their cloud migration at a high level.

• Make any necessary changes to the framework so it meets their organization’s special needs.

• Secure access for planners, architects and technicians to more detailed research from Gartner for Technical Professionals.

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Source: Gartner (June 2017)

FIGURE 1 Where This Research Fits in Gartner’s Body of Work

There are many research documents from Gartner explaining the cloud strategy-setting activity. Keep in mind that the best strategies are not overly detailed, and can be encapsulated on a single slide in a handful of bullet points. It is not necessary to have a completely expanded and detailed strategy to embark on your migration planning exercise.

Lay the Groundwork for MigrationSuccessful en masse cloud migration requires that you lay a foundation of basic capabilities ahead of the move. Think of it like building a highway to enable future travel. Key activities include:

• Selecting a strategic cloud service provider (CSP): For workloads based on integrated infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) elements (also known as IaaS+PaaS), identify which CSPs are in scope for the migration, and onboard them as vendors. Choose a strategic vendor, and optimize procurement and staff training accordingly; be open to using alternatives for some projects when justified by a business objective that can be achieved only in an alternative cloud. Be prepared to engage with many software as a service (SaaS) providers.

• Enabling connectivity: You can achieve migration to the cloud across three connectivity vectors: public internet, dedicated connection and physical transport. Public internet is the easiest to acquire, but may be bottlenecked by your ISP connection, or impediments in the routing pathways between you and the CSP. Dedicated connections provide guaranteed bandwidth at increased cost, and may be useful in hybrid cloud scenarios if retained after migration is complete. Physical transport, such as AWS Snowball from Amazon Web Services, is used to move large amounts of data, such as databases or virtual machine images, using the postal system or a commercial shipping service. Making adjustments to your existing connection, adding a dedicated connection, or acquiring and using a transfer appliance requires lead time and planning.

• Sourcing migration tools: You’ll need various tools to support every phase of migration. Tools can discover workloads, track their status, transform them between virtual machine formats and evaluate their performance in their new cloud context to determine if they meet their SLA.

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Equipping the organization: Create a cloud computing competency center within your organization to serve as the hub of cloud migration activities. Staff the center with at least one cloud architect to lead and champion the cloud cause, and provide engineers and technicians to drive the migration at scale. Provide basic training on the strategic cloud provider’s technologies and operational best practices that will be used by targeted workloads.

Getting optional help from a migration service provider: If you are challenged to find or build the skills, tools and best practices to do the migration yourself, especially if you are under a deadline to make the move quickly, turn to a migration service provider to deliver these capabilities on a project basis. The hyperscale cloud service providers maintain partner programs by which you can identify managed service providers and system integrators for this purpose. These partners are trained and usually certified by the CSP to provide migration services aligned with the CSPs best-practice recommendations. They bring their own tools, processes and people with them, and work with you to build and execute the migration plan. You also have the option of continuing the relationship after the migration by outsourcing the management of your cloud-based assets.

Use This Flowchart to Guide Migration PlanningThe Figure 2 flowchart is a high-level overview of a typical public cloud migration process. It shows the phases of discovery, evaluation, piloting and execution that are common to all successful migrations. However, it is not complete. The details of how each of these phases is accomplished are beyond the scope of this document, but can be found in our Gartner for Technical Professionals research.

Although the bulk of the migration is actually performed during the execution phase, you will want to manage all phases of the process to ensure completeness, attention to detail and to measure your success quantitatively. Be sure to apply program and project management formalisms and professionals to ensure rigor in defining and executing the migration, especially when the number of workloads is in the hundreds or thousands.

IT application leaders should use this flowchart as a way to guide the migration team in each of the following phases to ensure that choices made in defining the more detailed process align with the strategic decisions highlighted in the previous sections.

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DCO = data center outsourcing; SaaS =software as a service; VPC = virtual private cloudSource: Gartner (June 2017)

FIGURE 2 Cloud Migration Flowchart

Discovery Phase

Enterprise systems are complex multiworkload systems, and too often invalid assumptions are made about what workloads have affinities and should be moved as a group. A complete inventory can help identify outlying workloads that appear unimportant, but can wreck a migration if not included due to a dependency. Although it is not absolutely necessary for the inventory to be complete to plan and execute a migration, your chance of success will increase if you mandate that the team maintains a complete and thorough inventory prior to and during migration.

Evaluation Phase

Evaluation, assessing the inventory of workloads with the objective of assigning a migration disposition to each, is the most important phase of the migration. First, you’ll need a set of rules for determining whether a workload should even be considered as a candidate. The actual logic used here must be customized for your organization and its strategy. For example, in a forced data center eviction scenario where everything must go, the answer is an obvious “yes.” In a scenario where sensitive data is not yet deemed suitable for cloud placement, “no” could be a consequence.

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Of the workloads that are considered to be migration candidates, further assessment must lead to a disposition, which is one of rehost, refactor, rewrite, replace, leave alone or discard.

Rehosting and Refactoring — The Least Difficult, but Least Efficient, Paths

Rehosting is often called “lift and shift” — The goal is to move the workload to the destination with as few changes as possible. This typically means copying a virtual machine (VM) image, but could also be achieved by recreating (reinstalling) the application in a pristine VM. This framework provides for multiple types of destinations when rehosting, based on the perceived suitability of the VM in the targeted environment. Since there is a minimum transformation effort, the VM may convey with inherent deficiencies such as code vulnerabilities, inefficient resource use patterns or security weaknesses such as keeping large amounts of sensitive data in memory as cleartext. These VMs may be better-suited to the more customizable environments available from niche providers such as cloud hosters or colocation facilities, rather than hyperscale public cloud providers.

Refactoring is the next level up from rehosting, in which some components of the workload are replaced with cloud services. Note that the application code itself is not being refactored, but rather the services composing it. A prime example is replacing a self-managed relational database management system (RDBMS) instance with a cloud RDBMS service, or using nonintrusive, event-driven serverless functions to extend functionality or solve integration problems.

Although rehosting and refactoring are the most commonly chosen paths today, they are not the best choice for long-term cloud use. Initial costs to migrate are lower, but ongoing operational costs are higher due to the inefficiencies of legacy software stacks that do not fully leverage the elasticity and wide range of services available in the cloud environment. There are similar negatives for performance and security of legacy workloads running in the public cloud. Many Gartner clients still rehost or refactor knowing this because there are other balance sheet considerations that offset the cost (such as data center consolidation savings) or they have an eviction deadline to meet that does not allow time for more cloud-aware transformations. In such cases, your cloud strategy should also emphasize long-term modernization and rationalization of legacy apps.

Special Considerations for Software You Write and Maintain

Rewriting is only suitable for code you own and maintain. It can range from a minimal rewrite that enables more profound refactoring of both code and cloud services, to wholesale redesign (“rearchitecting”) of the application and its code to adopt cloud-native microservice architectures and best practices.

Rewriting can be expensive and difficult, and usually requires adopting new operational patterns for the software when it runs in production; this is why DevOps is a key cultural transformation that must accompany cloud-native initiatives. Since this path is much more involved than the others, many Gartner clients seek third-party expertise for application services to effect the transformation, or to acquire DevOps as a service to enable their own DevOps teams quickly.

Special Considerations for COTS Titles

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software titles are typically rehosted to public cloud, meaning you would create a self-managed instance running in a cloud-based VM. However, just like you, most independent software vendors (ISVs) are on a cloud journey and want to move their offerings there, to sell as a service; however, not all have a cloud-based solution today. Ideally, you will minimize the number of times you migrate an application, but there are risks to early adoption of new cloud-based versions. The migration exercise is a point at which you must consider two additional alternatives to COTS rehosting:

• Replace with an equivalent SaaS offering. Many ISVs have solved the problems inherent to harnessing the cloud to build true multitenant SaaS offerings; the trend will be for more to follow suit. Although good examples of “equivalent solutions” exist in market, the maturity and feature parity of new SaaS offerings do not always meet all customer requirements. Consider the SaaS offering of your current vendor, or a competitor, only if it meets your core needs and your risk tolerance matches the maturity of the product. Consult Gartner research on how to shop for and contract for SaaS solutions to ensure you get the best deal and have contractual protections to mitigate the caveats.

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• Replace with an equivalent IaaS-based marketplace offering. ISVs that are cloud-bound but not ready with a cloud-native SaaS offering feel they must make something available immediately, or risk losing customers. An intermediate solution is to offer an IaaS-based rehosted version of their existing product. Functionally, the solution behaves as if you had created a new VM-based installation in the cloud (self-deployed), but the deployment is actually done as a result of subscribing to an offering created by the ISV in a CSP’s marketplace. Once you sign up, the marketplace automation deploys the VM and installs the software for you. Management of these marketplace-sourced solutions is shared between you and the ISV, with a monthly licensing fee going to the ISV, and the cost of the IaaS underneath billed directly to you by the CSP. In many respects, the model is like SaaS. However, since it is not fully managed and is based on noncloud native architectures, the model can be both more complex and more expensive to operate than a real SaaS alternative.

If you decide not to use one of these alternatives and intend to rehost a COTS title yourself, be sure your usage rights under the terms of the license allow you to rehost it to a public cloud, or acquire a license that allows for it.

When Not to Migrate (Leave It Alone, or Discard)

You may find in the course of assessment that a workload should be deprioritized or perhaps even never migrated, not because it would be a violation of policy, but because there is no appreciable return on the investment to do the migration. If you will maintain an on-premises footprint, it may be best to simply leave it in place.

Finally, the workload evaluation phase allows you the opportunity to retire workloads that are no longer needed, or for which justification for continued support is not strong enough to warrant it. Use this as an opportunity to rationalize your portfolio and shed excess baggage.

Piloting Phase

Migrations to cloud are even trickier than ones you may have experienced in the past (such as physical to virtual). Even if you outsource skills from a third party, you should select a handful of noncritical applications that are representative of the different core workload types to be moved. Criteria should

be based on choosing at least one of each kind of disposition you anticipate (rehost or refactor, for example) and complexity of the workload (single VMs, multiple VMs, VMs plus database, and hybrid architecture, for example).

For cloud rewrites, piloting should be viewed through a lens of which applications will benefit the most from a cloud-native makeover, but still have the advantage of being small in scope and tractable for a new DevOps team. Follow Gartner’s bimodal best practices to run your cloud rewriting initiative in parallel with the other migrations. Always seek to minimize dependencies between them, but look for opportunities for each mode to enhance what the other does.

In all cases, the focus should not be on just completing a successful migration, but documenting and learning from the experience. Leverage program and project management professionals to give structure to these activities to ensure rigor and capture of lessons learned and best practices.

Execution Phase

After sufficient pilots have been completed and the outcomes assessed, build the execution plan to move the remaining set of workloads.

• First, reassess and reprioritize workloads based on lessons learned during piloting.

• Second, divide workloads into subgroups that should be moved together, or that must interoperate across a hybrid cloud interface (some parts on-premises, some parts in the cloud) and schedule them as a cohort.

• Third, organize migration teams into specialty areas, and match them to the migration subgroups that benefit most from their expertise.

After building the plan, move into the execution phase, relying heavily on project management skills to keep everything on track. Be prepared for setbacks and unexpected new lessons learned, and ensure your process allows for incorporating these new lessons as you proceed.

The operational phase that follows successful subgroup migrations will be the new steady state, and the requirements for the infrastructure and operations team will vary based on the new cloud context. For the DevOps-delivered products, a new culture and set of operational processes must be

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adopted. These are a separate set of challenges outside the scope of this document, and for which Gartner has additional research to help.

Make Changes As Needed to Suit Your OrganizationYou may need to alter the process outlined in the Use This Flowchart to Guide Migration Planning section in several ways to make it fit your needs. Some examples include, but are not limited to:

• According to size: This framework was optimized for migrating hundreds to thousands of distinct workloads. Smaller shops with tens of workloads may not benefit from extensive piloting or heavy program and project management, or team specialization. They may also find a migration service provider to be a better choice than doing it themselves.

• According to vertical: Enterprises in heavily regulated industries may need to put heavier processes in place to ensure the migration does not breach regulatory obligations. You may also find that specific best practices for your vertical are available from peers or industry-specific sources, and should be overlaid with the ones presented here.

• According to bimodal need: In bimodal IT environments, the two modes should run independently to avoid creating unnecessary dependencies that perturb established Mode 1 processes or impede the rapid time-to-value and business transformation outcomes for which Mode 2 is intended. The decision to take your own software and move it to DevOps and

cloud-native environments is usually a strategic one made by the business, not by IT. It may be that the infrastructure and operations (Mode 1) team runs the core migration process, with the line of business that owns the application making the decision to transform it to Mode 2, in effect, removing it from the main migration schedule and managing the redesign as a separate, branched process.

Equip Your Execution Teams With Detailed ResearchEach phase of the framework presented in this document is a placeholder for additional research that dives into deeper technical detail. There are many side issues not presented here that must be considered in tandem with the main migration workflow. For example, discovery requires selection of tools and applying them in the data center environment in such a way that discovery isn’t hampered by firewalls and other security measures. The evaluation phase is particularly deep and requires detailed technical understanding at both hardware and software layers to make appropriate choices. Building and leading a DevOps team day-to-day is a major skills acquisition and mindset overhaul for existing developers.

Gartner has additional research products, such as Gartner for Technical Professionals, which specifically target these activities at a more detailed level. Equip your cloud and application architects with this research to give them the deeper knowledge they require to implement a successful migration, especially if you intended to make the move without the help of a professional services vendor.

Source: Gartner Research Note G00332305, Craig Lowery, 20 June 2017

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About Skytap

Skytap is a global cloud provider that accelerates enterprise innovation by modernizing traditional applications with cloud-native development and services. Skytap Cloud makes it easy to build, run, and evolve these hybrid applications by rapidly migrating traditional workloads to the cloud, enabling modern development practices, and integrating new cloud architectures. We power multi- and hybrid-cloud strategies through secure connections to other clouds and on-premises datacenters. Our environments technology accelerates application development, simplifies management, and reduces IT costs, enabling hundreds of customers worldwide to modernize at the pace of their business. www.skytap.com

Accelerating Cloud Innovation with Hybrid Applications is published by Skytap. Editorial content supplied by Skytap is independent of Gartner analysis. All Gartner research is used with Gartner’s permission, and was originally published as part of Gartner’s syndicated research service available to all entitled Gartner clients. © 2017 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. The use of Gartner research in this publication does not indicate Gartner’s endorsement of Skytap’s products and/or strategies. Reproduction or distribution of this publication in any form without Gartner’s prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its shareholders may include firms and funds that have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner’s Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see “Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity” on its website.