You have put in the hard work, and you have convinced your WebSphere client of the value moving to cloud. They understand the many benefits, such as, increased efficiency, ease of access, simplified administration and management, and last but not least, lower costs. Your client wants you to move as much as possible to IBM Cloud Private. Your client will want your advice on how to start the migration process, and ultimately they want to know what it will cost. This blog discusses the best way to pursue this process with your client.
Your client is looking to you as the cloud expert to guide their transition to the cloud, and you can pursue this by answering three questions:
- What applications does the client have?
- What of these applications can be moved to cloud?
- How do I move these applications to cloud?
What does the client have?
The client will have an inventory of applications running on various platforms. The more you understand about the inventory the easier it will be to map their transition to the cloud.
What is ready to move to cloud?
The client’s application inventory will contain applications that are active, it will also contain applications that are out of date, or in need of repair, and it will contain applications that will conflict with the proposed new platform. Your client will want to keep the cost of migration to a minimum; therefore, understanding what applications will need to be updated or changed as part of any migration to cloud is essential. IBM has a tool that has been developed to provide direction for those moving to cloud. Transformation Advisor provides the capability to quickly evaluate your on-premises applications for rapid deployment on WebSphere Application Server and Liberty running on Public and/or Private Cloud environments.
What are the options for moving?
Some clients will want to move what they have as-is, and make it work in the cloud, typical lift and shift, which means packaging your applications in a VM and moving them to run on a VM in the cloud. This method does not take advantage of all the benefits of running your applications in the cloud.
Some clients are happy to move workload to the cloud over time, and will reengineer those applications they can to become, as far as possible, cloud-native, and get them running on the cloud, retaining workload on premises for those applications where the cost of reengineering is too high. Over time they will adopt suitable cloud-native applications as they become available.
The key to making the right decision is understanding the gap between where your client’s inventory is now and where you want it to be. Understanding the work and therefore the cost of reengineering the existing applications will help you match the scale of the migration to your client’s budget. The purpose of the Transformation Advisor is to allow you to estimate the development and test cost of moving your client’s inventory, thus allowing you to guide your client towards the most cost effective migration solution.
Transformation Advisor is part of IBM Cloud Private 2.1 and available to be run both in the Community Edition (CE) and the Enterprise Edition (EE). More information about Transformation Advisor can be found here:
https://developer.ibm.com/product-insights/transformation-advisor
IBM Cloud Private information is available here:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/W1559b1be149d_43b0_881e_9783f38faaff