How To Get There From Here? The Cloud Journey Starts With Visibility.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice. “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where, so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” said Alice. “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”―Alice in Wonderland

As the Cheshire Cat points out, if you don’t care where you want to go and don’t have a plan to get there, you will get to somewhere eventually, but it may not be where you want to go. 

Imagine you want to hike to a campground in an unfamiliar location.  Experts advise that you take inventory of what items you’ll need to survive in the wilderness and compare that to what you have now so you can fill in the gaps. You should also have up-to-date maps and mapping tools that can provide both visibility and guidance regarding routes, detours, and traffic information so you can plan the best way to reach your destination. Alice wouldn’t have bothered to do any of this, choosing the sense of adventure over responsible planning—ultimately ending up down the rabbit hole.

If you don’t plan your hike, you may still have your adventure. But that might entail a longer route with unplanned expenses and unexpected locations. Advanced planning spells the difference between a successful trip versus one that results in a lot of second-guessing and regrets later.

The same is true of IT initiatives, such as leveraging cloud infrastructure as part of a digital transformation strategy. Moving to the cloud is now foundational to many other IT initiatives, including application modernization, digital customer experience, and remote access for your employees and supply chain partners. Migrating applications to the cloud is an essential step in extending your infrastructure from data center to cloud.

However, before embarking on your cloud journey, implement what you would do before your hiking excursion: take inventory of your application assets to create a complete view of the interconnectedness between applications, users, devices, machines, and workloads.  The complexity found in today’s IT infrastructure is causing poor visibility of relationships and dependencies between workloads, applications, users and data, resulting in difficult, time-consuming, and risky cloud migrations.

Visibility of applications and their relationships helps you determine the following aspects of your plan:

1. The migration scope, and the costs and resources needed;
2. How and which applications should be modernized, rationalized, or retired and priority for each;
3. What applications should be moved together and if they depend on on-premise services;
4. How much capacity is needed to properly run the application in the cloud;
5. What security policies should be extended from the data center and enforced in the cloud;
6. The performance metrics and compliance requirements for the applications that have been moved.

Planning your work and then working your plan is foundational to successful application migration—just like your hiking excursion.

Learn more: Download the Guide for vArmour’s four-step approach to accelerate and simplify your secure cloud migration.

Also, read how this global telco moved nearly 6k apps and 400k workloads under 18 months instead of 4 years—with no issues.

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