The best journeys start with careful planning and specific goals – and leave room for improvisation or even suspending the journey when it makes sense. Migration of your enterprise’s critical applications to the cloud can benefit from a similar approach.

Before Migration: Ask (the Right) Questions

The cloud, whichever variation you choose, is definitely not your enterprise’s data center. This means that the rules that govern your on-premise applications may apply differently or not apply at all if you want to host those applications in the cloud. Here are a few of the questions you need to ask – and answer correctly – before migrating any on-premise application.

  • Do our current software contracts include the right to move licenses between our own data centers? How about moving them to third-party data centers?
  • Are our current software contracts “cloud-ready?” For example, if a cloud provider wants to replicate our data to improve availability, do our contracts permit or define parameters for replication?
  • Are we adequately prepared and equipped to negotiate entirely new contracts should moving any of our critical applications to the cloud require us to do so?
  • Do we have a plan for determining if migration of a particular application is successful, and reverting to an on-premise deployment (or replacing that application) if the migration does not succeed?

Answers to these questions, and to others that arise during your planning and evaluation efforts, are critical determinants of your application migration decisions. Failure to answer any of them could easily result in unpleasant surprises at best, and an entirely failed migration with no graceful recovery plan in place at worst. The popular aphorism holds true where application migration to the cloud is concerned. “If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.”

During and After Migration: Mind the Metrics

To determine whether your migration efforts are successful, you must have metrics in place that define success. And moving to the cloud likely means attempts to apply success metrics for on-premise deployments without modification will results in apples-to-oranges comparisons.

For example, migration to the cloud may require a different licensing model. If this is true, you will need to be able to compare characteristics of the old and new models meaningfully and accurately. If you cannot accurately compare current CPU licenses with the costs of licensing CPU resources in the cloud, how will you know if and when your migration will start saving your enterprise money?

Fortunately, some success metrics commonly applied to on-premise application deployments, such as user adoption help request rates, can be valuable in assessments of cloud-based applications too. However, you must have as clear, complete, and accurate a picture as possible of the costs and effects of every application migration you undertake, in every phase of that effort. This is at least as important during and immediately after every successful migration as it is in the planning phase that precedes it.

Ivanti: Let Us Help You Decide—and Succeed

To make the best possible decisions about whether, when, and how to migrate your applications to the cloud, you need both effective technologies and experienced expertise. Ivanti can help with both.

Ivanti software asset management (SAM) solutions have the power to help you model every candidate migration from start to finish. Ivanti License Optimizer for Clients and Servers can track license migration and the various costs associated with each project, including hardware, salaries, training, and maintenance, among others. Ivanti also maintains a database of legacy and current metrics and rules for all major vendors, including data center software providers. This means that you can accurately and efficiently baseline a license position prior to any migration planning.

In addition, Ivanti has experts and partners that can help you manage your license contracts more effectively. They can offer guidance on legacy contracts, your rights as a customer, and the creation and validation of new contracts governing licenses for cloud-based applications.

Read the data sheet, then, get a free demo or request a quote. Let Ivanti help you make the best possible decisions about migrating applications to the cloud—and succeed with every migration you choose to pursue.