Cloud Application Strategy

The cloud vendor handles application availability, security migration an upgrades using security that is delivered according to strict Service-Level Agreements (SLAs).

A viable business vendor needs to demonstrate that it can support a business through updates and innovations within the vendor’s own product.

With Cloud computing, the vender delivers the software with intuitive insight and Analytics, and only the client will be able to view, manage and manipulate the data that works with the application.

An effective cloud vendor should be able to minimize risk in the following ways:

• Availability
  For a cloud application to be considered a viable option, the     customer needs assurance that the application works according to the vendor customer agreement.
  So, the job of a cloud vendor is to ensure that its application will be available according to defined performance goals.
• Configurability
  With cloud applications, an organization can customize and configure an application to meet end-user needs and successfully integrate the application into a specific working environment.
• Security
  A cloud provider must offer security and data-privacy levels  to      all its customers with minimum cost.
  Processes and policies need to include physical, network, application, and data-level security, as well as full backup and disaster recovery.

Cloud applications must give organizations complete control of their data, even though the data is located off-site.

Authorized individuals should be able to import, export, purge, and archive data to and from the application without having to contact the vendor.

Cloud applications should be optimized for mobile experience which is not just about delivering data, but the data must be consumable and usable on a mobile interface.

A good cloud application comes with analytics tools and capabilities that efficiently deliver insight into the organization.

In a cloud application, analytics are embedded directly into business processes.

The application collects and analyses data in real time.

Organizations don’t need third-party tools for data interpretation.

Users of cloud applications with embedded analytics can configure their analytics to deliver meaningful data based on their needs.

Every customer on cloud applications is on the same version of the software.

The vendor can maintain a sustainable IT environment while developing and deploying new technology and innovative solutions that are based on evolving customer needs.

The vendor needs to upgrade the software from time to time based on the changing needs from time to time.

Cloud applications provide a streamlined and effective way to integrate applications and provide a comprehensive view of available data.

A cloud application is a single version of software that is regularly updated, often several times a year, for all customers.

The process is invisible to the customer and causes no disruption.

Allowing piecemeal and random cloud adoption is not ideal from the perspective of cost, security, or operational health.

A successful cloud migration requires careful preparation and planning (i.e. there is no one-size-fits-all approach to migrating to the cloud).

A deeper understanding of the infrastructure and application is required in order to fully understand the complexity, challenges, and costs involved.

The common application migration strategies are:

• Rehosting — Otherwise known as “lift-and-shift.”
  Usually, cloud projects gravitate towards a new development using cloud-native capabilities, but in a large legacy migration scenario, where the organization is looking to scale its migration    quickly, the need for Rehosting asise.
  Rehosting is the process of moving your existing physical and virtual servers to a solution based on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
  The key benefit of this approach is that systems can be migrated quickly without any modification to their architecture and is the  path usually taken by new companies.
  Here,  you’re basically treating the cloud as just another data center, which means you’re not  getting the most out of the available cloud services.
  For instance, let’s consider an  ASP.NET Web Application running on windows and you want to host it on AWS.
  You  can create a Windows VM that meets the size requirements  and deploy the application, and with the change in DNS record you are pretty much ready to go live.
  As simple as that.  But the drawback is that this solution isn’t highly available, or scalable, and it still requires you to manage OS patches.
• Refactoring
  Refactoring is the process of running your applications on the infrastructure of your cloud provider, also referred to as Platform as a Service (PaaS).
  PaaS means that developers are able to reuse the frameworks, languages, and containers in which they’ve already invested.
  This is driven by the strong business need to  leverage cloud capabilities to take advantage of some cloud-native features (offered by PaaS)  to reduce cost, improve scalability or performance, which would otherwise be difficult to achieve in  the applications current environment.
  However, the biggest drawback of this option include transitive risk, missing capabilities, and framework lock-in.
• Re-architecting
  In Re-architecting, the original coding is discarded, and it is re-built on a PaaS infrastructure.
  Rebuilding the application allows you to take advantage of more advanced and innovative features from your cloud provider. A major drawback of this option is vendor lock-in.
  This sort of cloud-native application would be inexpensive to operate and highly scalable.
  Migrating from a monolithic  architecture to  a service-oriented (or server-less) architecture will boost agility and improve your  business  continuity, but this pattern is a bit expensive.
• Replatforming — Otherwise known as “lift-tinker-and-shift.”
  Making few cloud  optimizations to achieve some tangible benefit without changing the core architecture of the application.  For instance, migrating to a database-as-a-service platform like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)  to reduce the amount of time you spend managing database instances.
• Repurchasing — ie. Moving to a different product
  In this scenario, you completely replace the existing application(s) with software delivered as a service (SaaS).
  An advantage of Repurchasing model is that it allows you to avoid IT development costs  However, the drawback is that you may encounter problems in accessing data, unpredictable data semantics, and vendor lock-in. An example might be to replace your local database with a managed option such as Cloud Datastore, Cosmos DB, or Dynamo.
• Retire — Get rid of
  Get rid of obsolete resources or IT Portfolio’s that are no longer required and optimize that resource for better purpose.
• Retain —  “revisit” or do nothing (for now)
  Maybe, you  aren’t ready to prioritize an application that was recently upgraded, or are otherwise not ready to migrate due to  an on-going application updates.  You should only migrate what makes  sense for the   business and  as portfolio changes from on-premises to the cloud, there will probably have fewer reasons to retain.