Episode Summary

iland Director of Cloud Market Intelligence Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Jim Jones, Amit Panchal, and Joe Houghes for a conversation around the concerns customers have with the readiness of their applications in the cloud. They discuss the limits to safely migrating applications to the cloud, how to assess an applications’ cloud readiness, and what customers should expect, and do, if they migrate an application that simply isn’t ready. We’re here to give you a pep talk: It’s okay if you can’t get everything up to the cloud.

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[03:18] Are we at the point where just about any application can safely be migrated into the cloud?

Topic 2

[06:05] What things do you recommend customers consider when assessing the cloud readiness of their applications?

Topic 3

[12:00] If an application that simply isn’t ready to run in the cloud gets migrated, what will customers experience and what are their options at that point?

Cloud Bites

[01:51] “You need to be aware of your dependencies and you need to be prepared for when those dependencies, being the cloud itself, go offline.” — Joe Houghes

[03:28] “If we take the old cliche of, ‘there is no cloud, there is just someone else’s computer,’ really any application can be run on the cloud.” — Jim Jones

[05:18] “One of the problems that we have with people that have missed this in the planning phase is they don’t necessarily have the objectives defined as why they’re potentially migrating an application to the cloud.” — Joe Houghes

[07:21] “I had a customer with, say, around 6000 applications a couple of years ago. They were just jumping heavily into a cloud, but no sort of readiness assessment was done. If they’d have just stepped back and did that kind of dependency mapping, cost optimization, scalability, and understanding, they probably would have ruled out more than 50 percent of those applications as suitable.” — Amit Panchal 

[08:37] “It shouldn’t be a peer pressure type of situation. There needs to be real discussion about the ‘why’ we’re trying to get that out there.” — Jim Jones

[10:13] “I think you at least have to step back and truly go through your application and the entire stack to just understand all the components that are there.” — Joe Houghes

[15:52] “We have found ourselves in this happy medium where you put the load where it makes sense and that’s where it should stay until something changes.” — Jim Jones 

[18:28] “Getting it back on-premises was a difficult task because it was having to unpick that application and make sure its constituent parts could be phased in back to an on-premises location.” — Amit Panchal 

[20:22] “So we went through a few different motions trying to move to cloud, even though it was on a SaaS platform, and then trying to move back and seeing the pain of that.” — Joe Houghes 

[22:15] “Not getting everything up to the cloud is not failure.” — Brian Knudtson 

[22:47] “Application readiness is a massive part of this transformation journey.” — Amit Panchal