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Microsoft just released a Cloud Migration assessment tool to enable organizations to assess the cost savings they can achieve by migrating to the Azure cloud. To sign up for the assessment, click here. Microsoft has also released a video outlining the assessment process.
Microsoft's tool and process follow the approach that I discuss in detail in my book The Great Cloud Migration: Your Roadmap to Cloud Computing Big Data and Linked Data. Specifically in Chapter 6, I describe the Assessment Phase of your Cloud Implementation Strategy and it includes the initial step that Microsoft's tool provides. Here is that part of Chapter 6:
· Metadata Collection – the assessment process requires information on each major component of your current IT systems in order to analyze it in relation to the objective, transformed architecture. Figure 76 provides a zoomed-in view and additional detail on each type of assessment including some of the attributes that would be collected.
o Hardware Assessment – the most basic level of any IT system is the physical hardware it is running on. Therefore, in order to determine the capacity requirements for the objective system the best place to start is to understand your current capacity investment via a detailed hardware inventory. This is especially important related to those characteristics that are the cost components of provisioning systems in the cloud. In other words, you are trying to determine the cost of hosting your current hardware investment in a public or private cloud. The cost components of a cloud server are the computing capacity (number of cores), the required memory (in gigabytes) and the required hard-drive space (in gigabytes or terabytes). An additional, and crucial, part of the metadata collection is to perform interviews or depending on the amount of time you have for the assessment actually profile the running applications to determine if the current hardware is correctly sized for their application’s requirements. Typically, the hardware is sized for the worst-case scenario and money is wasted on over-capacity. This can be corrected when migrating to the cloud and combined with a scaling strategy to handle the worst case scenario.
The Implementation Strategy has three stages: Assessment, Architecture and Action. However, beyond the hardware assessment (which Microsoft covers well), there are other types of assessments that are needed as depicted in the figure below (Figure 76 in the book).
So, as you can see while Microsoft provides a great first step, the assessment phase of your Cloud Computing Roadmap should only use that as a first step and continue the due diligence process. Doing the additional analysis and evaluation will drastically increase your chances of migrating to the cloud successfully! Best wishes!