How Amaze® Expedites and Simplifies the Application Portfolio Assessment Process?

If an enterprise is set to embark on its cloud journey, it is imperative to conduct a meticulous cloud assessment. Since cloud adoption is expected to grow multifold in coming years, enterprises should conduct a thorough cloud readiness assessment keeping future state and required cloud elasticity in mind. But due to the unavailability of proficient tools and skilled cloud experts, it becomes challenging to discover complete application anomalies, leading to higher cost and scalability issues.

In contrast to other assessment tools, the amaze^® assessment analyzes the fitment of a group of applications to discover their readiness for transformation with 100% automation. Amaze^® automates the cloud journey by as much as 70% resulting in the fastest, most cost-effective cloud migration with high quality, better predictability, and minimum risk. With its automation-first approach, amaze^® enables rapid assessment of applications irrespective of their complexity and provides an in-depth analysis report.

The three-pronged amaze^® application portfolio assessment process includes:

• Application Discovery and Readiness Analysis
• Cloud Transform Readiness Assessment
• Migration Planning Phase

1. Application Discovery and Readiness Analysis

There are portfolios of 1000’s of applications, and there is a need to understand which application will map to its corresponding R Treatment. The amaze^® Portfolio Discovery Platform automatically finds the most suitable cloud strategy from Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Rearchitect, and Rebuild for each of these applications.

In the primary phase, the amaze^® assessment suite is installed in the client environment. The suite of tools automatically discovers, tags and collates all the IT estate information. The assessment team parallelly conducts data validation and data gathering workshops and conducts interviews with the application owners and other relevant stakeholders.

The discovery phase includes the following process:

• Discussing assessment prerequisites – InfoSec, code access, etc.
• Defining success criteria
• Understanding the business and I.T. roadmap
• Collecting environment information such as OS, CPU cores, memory, locations, network infrastructure, VMware hosts, VDI, data, connectivity information, etc.
• Creating portfolio demographics by technology
• Spotting key risk areas
• Slicing & dicing by the line of business, business value, technology
• Analyze existing vendor deliveries and reusable possibilities
• Understanding legacy functions’ footprint and their current usage

The application portfolio assessment is done in 2-3 days, and the platform shares insights on multiple parameters, as listed below:

• Portfolio Snapshot
• Cloud Roadmap and Recommendations
• Application Health Quotient
• Rehost Readiness
• Replatform Readiness
• Refactor Readiness
• Rearchitect Readiness
• Containerization Readiness
• Application Dependency
• Wave Grouping

Once we identify that the application needs to be replatform, refactor, or rearchitect, there are a lot of
decision-making factors to be considered. In order to make the design decisions correctly, the next level of assessment – Cloud Transform Readiness Assessment needs to be performed.

2. Cloud Transform Readiness Assessment

The assessment takes into consideration the source and target patterns to gather insights on the complexity of transformation. This assessment helps understand the application readiness and estimates the time and effort needed in refactoring the code.

In the assessment phase, the static code/configuration files of the applications are analyzed. The key factors analyzed in the assessment phase are the application inventory, technology landscape, and cloud readiness of the application, and the R-Treatment report is generated by amaze^®.  The cloud assessment is conducted as per amaze^®’s methodology for the identification of improvement opportunities, issues, and risks, and below is the process followed:

• Gathering insights by automated source code analysis of hundreds of applications within a week
• Drilling into key-risk details by application and technology
• Performing security analysis by detecting common vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) on applications frameworks
• Performing complexity and workload analysis
• Reporting resource metrics (application health, compliance, security, and utilization)
• Monitoring software resiliency & agility insights
• Assessing PaaS/CaaS/FaaS cloud readiness and identifying the technical roadblocks
• Collecting container readiness insights
• Assessing cloud migration readiness (rehost readiness, replatform readiness, refactor readiness, rearchitect readiness)
• Classification of jobs into simple, medium and complex
• Performing TCO analysis with an automation led TCO calculator and getting a detailed cost analysis report for making the correct cost decisions

The Cloud Transform Readiness Assessment Report will depict the readiness of the application for cloud transformation. The report also details how it arrives at the numbers by going back deep into the lines of code. It provides hyperlinks that show why the application code needs to be refactor. It identifies replatforming blockers and pinpoints to the code that needs to be refactor.

3. Migration Planning Phase

Post all the data gathering and analysis, application migration planning is done with the prospect, and considering the application insights, the application roadmap, assessment reports, and the Cloud Readiness Index (CRI) are prepared. The planning phase includes the following processes:

• Preparing the Cloud Readiness Index for actionable insights to make a decision on the
  migration path and target platform
• Planning wave groups and delivery details
• Analyzing the fitment of the best-suited cloud platform – Azure Cloud/ AWS Cloud/ Google Cloud/ Private Cloud
• Recommending the end state (Retire/Retain/Replatform/Replace, etc.)
• Arriving at the most applicable wave groups for migration based on the application characteristics, existing CMDB dump, and application interdependencies mapping
• Recommending capacity optimizing options
• Validating the findings and sharing the estimated timelines and cost of the application migration plan
• Presenting the interim and final report to the stakeholders and validating the findings, cost, and timelines for migration

Outcome of the 360 degree Application Portfolio Assessment Process

With deep knowledge and proven processes, amaze^® assesses the cloud migration readiness of portfolio applications and provides a detailed assessment report that incorporates the following:

• Cloud Readiness Index
• Key cloud treatment details
• Target architecture recommendation for all workloads
• R-treatment recommendation
• Architecture Health Quotient
• Resource utilization and right sizing recommendation
• Dependency mapping
• Optimized Cloud IaaS price modeling across multiple cloud platforms (Private Cloud, Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc.)
• Vulnerability assessment report
• Migration wave plan and execution timelines
• Migration risks & mitigation plan
• TCO analysis
• Estimated timelines and the cost of migration

The application portfolio assessment process provides detailed insights into the client’s existing application architecture, and the amaze^® assessment team conducts workshops and presentations with the client and relevant stakeholders to discuss the final amaze^® assessment report, understand their views and tailor-make the perfect cloud migration plan.

Reach us now at amaze@hexaware.com and check out the amaze^® product suite. Stay competitive and
re-imagine customer experiences with right cloud migration strategy. Benefit from our transformative solutions across any cloud and drive cost optimization with hyper business agility.