Application Modernization is one of the critical levers for Digital Transformation. Enterprises need to expedite their application modernization journey to provide agility and scalability to the business, ensure better preparedness to address changing customer demands, and stay relevant with their product offerings. Preparation is the key before embarking on your modernizing journey.

Why Assessment is critical?

Assessment activities are critical for any business embarking on long-running cloud programs because the nature of that journey involves risk and cost. The first step is to assess the applications and their dependencies to determine which applications are suitable to modernize and which ones cannot change or move. It helps identify the right migration strategy to the cloud as-is or with changes to the application code or configuration. It is not only applications that are moving to the cloud, but also the business itself is transforming. Therefore, from deciding to move ahead to enabling actual migrations, a data-backed assessment is critical, which helps reduce risk and cost, align business and IT priorities, and accelerate business outcomes.

How do we assess and analyze applications?

A great analogy is a way we get our treatment done with doctors. When we are sick, doctors advise us to take specific diagnostic tests, and then by listening to our behavioral symptoms; doctors can recommend a suitable treatment plan. Similarly, the assessment helps in taking a diagnostic approach to applications by not only looking at diagnostic data in the form of source code assessment but also looking at application objectives and future roadmap as behavioral symptoms before concluding with the treatment plan.

An enterprise must consider both the technological aspects and the business context of each application to evaluate an application portfolio for cloud migration properly. The seven steps of data collection (assessment) listed below are effective in supporting the migration assessment:

1. Establish the project's business goals and objectives for cloud migration
   Early in the attempt to migrate to the cloud, establish quantifiable goals. Goals like "Save $X billion in OPEX yearly" or "Reduce time to recovery for application to two minutes" are examples of more precise objectives.
2. Build a comprehensive inventory of applications
   Application discovery and data imports can help here. For mature organizations already practicing application portfolio management, this can be as simple as exporting to Excel to get started.
3. Take stock of the servers, databases, and storage space
   Each app's dependencies include databases, message brokers, configuration storage systems, and other components.
4. Create basic application dependency maps
   A high-level view of which applications are running on which servers in the enterprise. Generally, three levels of detail are captured, i.e., applications, database instances, and servers. This step aims to highlight the complexity of each application and to begin understanding the underlying infrastructure.
5. List the application technologies being used
   Capture the required technology stack for each application in scope, for example, front-end technologies such as Angular, middleware, backend, integration, 3rd party products, reporting, databases, etc. Static source code analysis can provide more information on software libraries used in application code.
6. Examine source code for applications marked for refactoring and re-platforming
   It will indicate software complexity and dependencies to estimate these transforming applications.
7. Categorizing the applications
   After completing the application inventory, organize the apps into different categories, say how critical the app is, has no dependency, etc. This categorization will help prioritize the apps to migrate according to their complexity and risk in moving to the cloud.

Each application can be evaluated and assign as per the below 6 R’s (migration strategy)

The selected strategy influences the expected migration effort, the potential benefit of using the Cloud, and the possible long-term cost savings of the new operating model.

An enterprise must consider both the technological aspects and the business context of each application to evaluate an application portfolio for cloud migration properly

Approach & Tools

Top-down and Bottoms-up approaches should be used in tandem to assess the application portfolio and gather the required data:

• Top-Down
  The critical goal of Top-down assessment is to understand the strategic imperative of applications and how the business views its relevancy aligned with the organization's roadmap towards digital transformation. As part of the assessment, workshops are conducted with Application stakeholders to gather technical and business information. It will help in understanding the As-Is architecture of an application and planning the target To-Be state after modernization.

The below table highlights some of the questions that should be answered during the deep dive application assessment phase. Based on the portfolio and modernization scope, the questions will change.

• Bottoms-Up
  Analyzing the applications from a bottoms-up perspective is aimed providing a view into the eligibility at a technical level, i.e., code scanning/VM configurations of an application. Mainly Bottoms-Up assessment is done using various assessment tools.

These tools are available for organizations to assess their readiness for the cloud. The selection of tools depends on migration strategy, whether ReHost or ReFactor. These tools provide an automated and standardized process for assessing large-scale application landscapes for cloud readiness and finding the right plan based on the 6Rs of cloud migration.

The flow below illustrates the recommended tools the customer can leverage based on their migration journey, current phase, and strategy.

• StratoZone : Stratozone is a quick and comprehensive assessment tool from Google Cloud that helps in migrating infrastructure to Google Cloud while optimizing costs on the cloud. We can compare prices for the components planned to be migrated, importing them from other sources of data directly into the Stratozone portal. The tool provides actionable insights based on the configuration, utilization, network dependencies, and installed applications for each server.
• CAST Highlight : CAST Highlight tool helps discover specific source code patterns that prevent code upgrades, re-factoring, and adoption of containers and provides precise recommendations on removing these blockers—identifying patterns blocking migration to the cloud (e.g., COM components or use of persistent files). It offers accurate guidance on where and how to remediate such blockers.
• mFIT: The fit assessment tool provides with technical fit assessments of workloads targeted for Google Cloud, which helps in determining the potential of modernization, and informs if there are any technical blockers to modernization. The fit assessment provides:
  • Ability to get the assessment information about VMware VMs through a direct connection to vCenter.
  • A detailed report on the applicable assessment rules, including any technical blockers to modernization.
• MigVisor: A database cloud migration assessment tool that aids in analyzing complex database environments and generates metrics and insights that are valuable for planning database migrations to Google Cloud offerings like Cloud SQL and Cloud Spanner. Customer database environments often leverage technologies from multiple vendors across different versions and can run into thousands of deployments. This makes manual assessment cumbersome and error prone. MigVisor offers users a simple, automated collection tool to analyze metadata across multiple database types, assess migration complexity, and provide a roadmap to carry out phased migrations, thus reducing risk.

Outcome of Application Assessment

Application migration assessment lays the groundwork for an automated and efficient transformation; saying so does not imply that it is a one-time activity. Continuously assessing the portfolio is vital to successful digital transformation, as illustrated below. Using a data-driven and analytical approach, enterprises can determine the relative difficulty in migrating/modernizing an application to the cloud with a cost-benefit analysis. It also assesses the business value of making such a move.

We should expect below mentioned outcomes from a migration assessment:

• A roadmap for modernizing core business applications, including business benefits, TCO, and dependencies
• An application modernization blueprint (high level reference architecture) to specify the technical and functional architecture for the target state of a modernized application
• Estimates and Timeline (Migration Plan)
• An action plan to resolve the identified gaps, laying down the foundation for next path in the cloud journey

Conclusion

Application assessment is typically associated with early stages of migration. This is when there is a strong need for data and analysis to create the business case and produce initial plans. However, after the early stages, application and infrastructure assessment becomes a continuous and interactive set of activities across the entire lifecycle of long-running programs. The progressive and continuous assessment approach, with varying levels of data quantity and fidelity, enhances the understanding of the portfolio until it is migrated. Then the approach focuses on assessment for further optimization and modernization.

To learn more and schedule an application assessment or a demo session, please write to us at HCLGoogleBU@hcltech.com