VIRTUAL OFFICE MIGRATION

Assessing Applications for a Cloud Migration

Now, it’s time to see if your line of business applications are cloud-ready. Here are some factors that you will need to consider:

Application design complexity:

Some traditional applications are so complicated and tightly coupled you may not be willing to rework them. However, the foremost requirement for any successful office migration is that your applications should follow a distributed architecture and should be scalable by design.  Most commonly used line of business applications like Microsoft Office, Quickbooks, VoIP phone systems, document management system, and others have matured to the point that they can all be run and scaled properly in either a public, private or hybrid cloud platform.  If you have custom developed applications, there are a number of tools which can help you assess the applications’ cloud-readiness and we can help with this assessment.

Integration complexity:

Every application has its integration points, such as payment gateways, web services, external storage, and third-party vendors. It’s very important to analyze the impact your cloud migration will have on those dependencies. Sometimes you will experience unexpected connectivity or authentication challenges that you should identify and solve up front. The most critical (and tedious) task is to identify all of those integration points. Since older applications might be poorly documented and the developers familiar with the end-to-end functional and non-functional details may no longer be available, you might have to go through each module manually.

Many of these issues can be addressed through a combination of the familiarity your team has with the software applications and an asset discovery tool (either open source or commercial). An asset discovery tool can help you identify entire server configurations within a network, along with connectivity details. For example, say that you have a server room in your office that has 20 different servers running various applications and services. A discovery tool can give you the bird’s eye view of the entire system.  It can also provide granular details that will help provide a dependencies assessment.

The host operating system:

Once you have decided on cloud migration, it’s important to know whether you will be able to deploy your applications on the same OS. Your applications may only run on a specific OS (or OS release). If it’s not compatible with the virtualization platform, then we will need to find a workable substitute OS, a different virtualization platform, or simply leave the application on a “non-unvirtualized” server. For instance, most virtualization platforms don’t provide 32-bit OS options and others might have unexpected subscription requirements. It’s best to do your research in advance.

The application database:

A database is obviously a critical part of any application. You can invest a great deal on database servers and, often, licenses. Moreover, given the complexity and sensitivity of your data, you just might not want to move it right now: migrating terabytes of data is no trivial undertaking. In either case, you should make sure that the migration methods you use are highly reliable and come with the possibility of rollbacks to deal with any unexpected chaos.  Most modern database solutions offer migration paths and tools. However, it’s very important to evaluate those migration paths before pushing the “start” button.

Networking / Connectivity:

How will you be connecting from your physical office to your virtual office?  In most virtual office scenarios this is done over an encrypted Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel.  Once you have migrated your servers to the datacenter and virtualized your office, it is important to make sure that you have a reliable means for connecting to the remote network.  VPN tunnels are a very mature, highly secure means by which you can use your home or office internet connection to create a direct, encrypted link between your physical workspace and your virtual workspace.  Typically this will require that we have a router / firewall installed in the datacenter protecting access to your infrastructure and another firewall in your office that creates a permanent tunnel to the datacenter.  Alternatively, you can also have a VPN client installed directly on your laptop or office computer that will quickly create the same secure connection on demand.  Once this is in place, you can literally access your virtual office from anywhere you have a reliable internet connection.