Application Rationalization: 5-Day Workshop

Application Rationalization is an essential planning activity when considering larger volumes of applications and servers to migrate to Azure. Most data centers have 15-20% of their applications sitting unused or have no business sponsor. When considering a move to Azure, understanding applications that need to be retired can significantly improve your migration payload.

Application Rationalization is also used to determine the disposition of workloads during the migration to Azure. While most workloads will re-host VMs through a Lift and Shift Migration, articulating alternate migration strategies that take advantage of Azure-native functionality can lead to better Azure application architectures.

This is one of the components of our Cloud Migration Module to expedite migrating workloads to Microsoft Azure. We build a solution unique to your needs by combining components together to provide the exact services needed.

Objectives of Application Rationalization

The first goal is to determine which application workloads are to be migrated. In most customer data centers, 15-20% of applications are unused or will not need to migrate, so determining these up-front will reduce the time, effort and cost in Azure migration. Softchoice can help identify the priorities in your business for Azure migration. This reduces waste in Azure as well as delivering the correct business value from the cloud.

We then examine the remaining workloads to determine the Azure migration strategy for each. The migration method or end state for each workload are defined in the industry standard 5R’s migration framework. We provide migration options for each of these dispositions. This accelerates future Azure migration activities with a well-formed Migration Backlog.

• Re-host - Lift and Shift Migration
• Re-platform - Re-platform components of the workload to Azure-native functions
• Re-factor - Application Modernization
• Re-architect - Application Modernization
• Retire or Retain - No migration necessary

Agenda

• Day 1: Collect a list of application workloads as candidates for a future Azure migration
• Days 2-4: Interview business stakeholders to determine workloads to be migrated
• Day 5: Evaluate each workload against technical, and customer business, requirements and determine the most suitable migration type for each workload. Then create the Migration Backlog for future Azure migration work. This is the list of workloads to be migrated, any business priorities noted, and the migration method for each.