Ensuring a Seamless App Cloud Migration: A Comprehensive Checklist From a Technological Angle (Part One)

App migration to cloud services yields many benefits, including reduced cost, agility, high scalability, efficiency improvements, and, for the most part, better system performance. Cloud computing today seems to be the future for most applications.  

Nevertheless, the cloud isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Each organization relies on a unique infrastructure with applications, systems, and platforms to drive its operations. Thus, verifying that your applications are ready for the cloud migration process is essential. 

This guide will help you evaluate your cloud readiness and determine the areas that should be reviewed. Like any other business transformation, the success of the cloud transition requires changes in three main areas: technology, processes, and people.   

Let’s start by digging deeper into the technology aspect that may need to be adjusted by an organization to successfully adapt to using the cloud. 

Cloud Readiness Assessment From a Technology Perspective

To evaluate your readiness to transition to the cloud from a technology viewpoint, you’d need to check your current technology stack, app characteristics, architecture, and data.  

Migration to the cloud may be challenging and require a lot of skill and effort for applications that: 

• Are built on unique hardware that is not represented in the cloud and cannot be virtualized (e.g., specific IoT apps, cryptocurrency cold wallet, etc.)
• Have strict security requirements (e.g., aircraft flight control systems, military software, government voting systems, etc.); 
• Are built on outdated technologies (e.g., apps based on old programming languages like COBOL, ALGOL, etc.); 
• Imply sensitive data processing and storage (e.g., banking and medical apps)

Everything else can be migrated to the cloud, and it’s instead a matter of defining the best-fit cloud infrastructure that would comprehensively address your business needs. Applications requiring more solid security characteristics can be hosted in a private cloud (in whole or partially), while others would perfectly fit into a public cloud. Some businesses can choose a multi-cloud disaster recovery solution and avoid vendor lock-in. Cloud technologies provide many possible solutions to diverse business needs and limitations; however, making your app more cloud-friendly would help you get the most out of migration to the Cloud. 

Let's look at the technical aspects that must be checked during the application cloud readiness assessment.  

Application Cloud Readiness in Terms of Architecture

One of the most important things to figure out before cloud adoption is how the whole application is built. First of all, your application should be able to operate inside a virtualized environment most efficiently. To figure out if your architecture is ready for this, take into account: 

• Application architecture type. If it is built on a monolithic architecture, it makes sense to consider the conversion to a microservices approach applying virtual machines or containers. This may be time-consuming and expensive. However, it will provide many benefits besides moving to the cloud, such as making your solution more flexible and accessible to customize and maintain. 
• App complexity regarding LOC (line of code), number of servers, and infrastructure elements. Each component increases the cost of migration and makes the process more time-consuming. If there are a lot of lines of code (100.000+), servers, and infrastructure elements, it may be reasonable to check what can be cut and optimized. 
• Storage and backup size (magnitude of it: 1GB, 1TB, 1PB, hot, cold). Storage size will also affect your cloud expenditure. Ensure that only you need is in your storage; otherwise, you will have to pay for old junk that does not provide value. 
• Requirements for latency and your network specifics. Cloud-hosted applications should have the same or better performance than on-premises deployments. If adequate network bandwidth is unavailable for the application to perform, it will lead to latency and a bad user experience. You should think thoroughly about these network limitations and assess the current application performance to determine areas for enhancements. 
• Requirements for high availability and redundancy (zero-downtime deployment, maintenance window, SLA requirements). For example, if you need to achieve zero-downtime deployment, you need to be ready to invest more time and money at the initial migration stage.   

Security Requirements 

One of the crucial steps of your application migration readiness strategy is to assess the security mechanisms and the degree of protection that should be applied to different categories of data your app handles. You must thoroughly investigate country- and industry-specific standards for your app. Those may impose specific hardware, software, and organizational requirements for the application infrastructure, and it may happen that during cloud migration, the application becomes incompatible with these standards. 

Therefore, we recommend that you ensure your cloud provider is compatible with your industry and country-specific requirements related to security compliance, GDPR readiness, the disaster recovery process, firewalls, etc. If your data requires high security, you must look for a provider with appropriate certifications. For example, if your business is in the healthcare sector, you should choose a more niche cloud provider that can enforce HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) requirements. 

The most popular cloud providers, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure Google Cloud, deliver advanced threat protection for workloads in the cloud. For example, the AWS cloud provides a GovCloud option for applications that demand advanced security and special requirements for data handling.  

Depth of Legacy and Technical Debt

A crucial element of application assessment for cloud migration is to check your depth of legacy and evaluate technical debt. If the code was written long ago and has not been updated for quite a while, but it works fine and is a good match for your needs, there is no problem with the app becoming legacy. However, as soon as you want to move to the cloud, problems may arise. 

Even if a legacy app still works, it may become unstable because of compatibility issues with current operating systems and IT infrastructure. In this case, the best option is to check with your in-house experts or cloud migration service providers if your legacy application can be migrated to the cloud or if the code should be rewritten before migration. 

The accumulation of technical debt is another factor that negatively affects the organization's ability to apply new technologies. Technical debt is the consequence of dealing with challenging requirements when you choose short-term solutions that can be adverse for your business in the long run. For instance, introducing an overnight solution that is difficult to integrate with other systems or does not support horizontal scaling by design can have a big influence on the possibility of future updates and transformation initiatives such as cloud migration. 

So, make sure that before cloud adoption, you create a technical debt reduction plan because migration may become a multiplier that substantially increases your technical debt.