Application Pruning

Overview

This first approach is a very straightforward and is often the first type of approach that an organization might use on adopting cloud. It is the migration of a single application in its entirety and where all the components and tiers of an application are migrated to cloud together.

This approach is very often referred to as a lift-and-shift and the focus on moving the application is often to change as little as possible, and to minimize business impact or disruption - perhaps to the extent where a typical business user may not notice any change whatsoever.

Refactor

Benefits

The value that this approach offers is quite limited. These smaller applications are generally inexpensive to run and maintain and do not require significant infrastructure.

Use

In this representation, the hexagon represents the IT of the organization, the large dark circles domain areas (e.g. CRM, Finance etc), the smaller light circles specific large “hub” applications (e.g. Order Management, Warehouse Management) and the tiny circles are “satellite” applications that typically surround the much larger core applications.

The activity of “pruning” focuses on the smaller, satellite applications that are typically smaller, less business critical and so easier to move to the cloud. When applied at a broader enterprise scale a term for this might be Application pruning. In this simplest case all the tiers of applications are selected for migration to cloud and are migrated as a unit, but for just a single application at a time.

Additionally, because these systems are “satellite” systems to a hub system, there is a significant communication load between those systems and the hub, and so this may introduce latency or bandwidth challenges.

This type of approach is often IT-led with applications selected because of their technology rather than their business ownership. Typically, these are smaller applications, perhaps residing on a single server or a single virtual machine.

From a technology perspective, these migrations are almost entirely limited to x86 to x86 migrations. Where the source systems are other chip architectures, then the degree of change and thus testing required is much more significant and so cannot be considered a “lift-and-shift”

Challenges

A significant challenge to this approach is business sponsorship. While the IT benefits might be clear at the IT estate level, the benefits to any single line-of-business C-level exec are very likely diluted, and since the only real benefit is IT simplification (and maybe some level of IT cost reduction) then it rare to see any benefit

Use Cases