Migrating Applications to Hybrid Cloud Computing

Five challenges to realise the benefits of cloud

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of strategic hybrid cloud adoption programs across the financial services industry, with the result that many firms have been rapidly building or buying private cloud platforms and integrating public cloud services. However, there has been relatively slow progress in migrating applications and business processes onto these platforms. Cloud computing can deliver significant benefits, but many firms have found that it also presents complex challenges that are preventing or slowing mass adoption.

In order to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing for applications, without increasing business risk or impacting customers, firms should take a strategic and methodical approach. This approach should address the following five distinct but interrelated challenges to ensure successful mass adoption:

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Challenge 1: What applications are suitable for migration to cloud computing?

Challenge 2: Is there sufficient business justification for migrating an application?

Challenge 3: What is the best technical approach for migrating an application?

Challenge 4: What integration solutions are needed to support an application on the cloud platform?

Challenge 5: What security and compliance risks or obligations need to be addressed?

These challenges and the complexities involved in addressing them should be understood by the entire business and IT community, in order to address questions on cloud adoption from three perspectives:

  • Business: Why is moving my business to the cloud so complicated, slow and costly?
  • Application: What should I be considering when planning to migrate applications to cloud computing?
  • Infrastructure: How can I help accelerate or enable mass adoption of cloud computing while maintaining compliance and a competitive cost base?

This paper is aimed at IT and business decision makers, with a large portfolio of complex applications, to help answer these three questions and provide guidance on how to tackle the five challenges with best practices and activities to plan and implement a hybrid cloud adoption roadmap.

The paper assumes the reader is familiar with basic cloud computing concepts and the associated terminology. There are two main sections to the paper:

  • Cloud Suitability: describes some aspects of the objectives, suitability and risks that should be considered when migrating enterprise applications to cloud computing, and provides some guidance on the different types of applications that are best suited for migration to cloud computing
  • Cloud Adoption Approach: describes five key challenges that must be addressed when migrating a large portfolio of complex applications to cloud computing, and suggests a structured methodology for identifying suitable applications with guidance on activities to plan and implement a successful cloud adoption roadmap

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The author

David Sewell

David Sewell

CTO & Partner, London

An innovative technologist with more than twenty years experience creating IT strategies and building solutions for eTrading applications, market data and shared platforms, including hybrid cloud across the capital markets industry.