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Image: 6 Critical Factors for Assessing Cloud Migration to AWS vs. Azure vs. Google

With multi-cloud as the preferred strategy for 84 percent of enterprises, IT teams need to assess which applications and business services are appropriate for cloud migration, and whether they should be migrated to AWS vs. Azure vs. Google vs. other public clouds. To make the right decision for each application, cloud migration assessment tools must provide the ability to analyze both the technical and cost aspects of moving to different clouds without bias toward any particular cloud. By comparing these cloud migration factors across multiple clouds, enterprises can then determine the best option for each application among their preferred cloud providers. There are six critical factors for organizations to consider as they assess applications for migration to cloud.

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1. Unbiased migration assessment for AWS, Azure, Google and others

With Flexera’s recent acquisition of RISC Networks, Flexera now provides the leading cloud migration assessment solution that offers unbiased analysis of migration feasibility and cost across AWS, Azure, Google and other public cloud providers. Flexera’s long history of vendor-independence provides confidence your assessments will be accurate and not slanted toward any particular cloud provider. Flexera’s customizable cloud migration scoring lets you tailor the weight and the importance of each factor in the assessment and see results across multiple clouds. You don’t need to rely on analysis from tools owned by cloud providers focused on moving you to their cloud or reveal data about your use of their on-premises software. With Flexera, your data is private unless you choose to share it with a cloud provider.

2. Comprehensive and accurate discovery of your business services

The most difficult factor in planning cloud migrations is gaining a comprehensive and accurate view of your current on-premises environments. Many of your IT-delivered business services involve multiple interrelated components and applications that evolved over years, with IT staff changing along the way. As a result, it can be difficult to create an accurate picture of the components needed to successfully migrate a complete business service from the data center to the cloud. Flexera’s cloud migration solution provides comprehensive bottom-up discovery that finds every business service and application running on-premise—including those you don’t know about. Leveraging patented technology, Flexera eliminates the noise of typical dependency mapping tools and delivers a clean picture of each business service or application. This business service view then becomes the basis for both technical and cost assessments for cloud migration.

3. Customizable technical assessments

After creating a business service mapping, Flexera assesses the technical factors of each business service to categorize the level of effort required to migrate, from re-host to re-platform to re-architect. You can customize the technical assessment to adjust the weight of each of the factors. This allows you to tailor the results to specifics of your environment and needs. For example, if storage in your data centers is near capacity, you might want to accelerate the migration of applications that use a lot of storage. Or you might want to delay migration of applications with large numbers of users or associated with particular departments.

4. Understanding your on-premises costs and usage by business service

Many organizations have a difficult time assessing their current on-premises costs for a business service, which makes it difficult to compare the potential cost benefit of moving that business service to the cloud. Because Flexera’s discovery capability provides an accurate view of the components that make up each business service, Flexera can calculate the current on-premise costs using either industry-standard prices for CPU, memory and other resources, or custom prices that you provide. This on-premises cost provides a critical baseline in your cloud assessment. In addition, Flexera discovers the actual utilization of each resource for each component, from CPU to memory to storage to IOPS. This rich utilization data enables you to properly rightsize each component as you move to the cloud.

5. Compare costs across on-premises and multiple clouds

Flexera provides cost comparisons between the current on-premises costs vs. costs on AWS, Azure, Google or other public clouds. These cloud costs are calculated based on current on-premise allocation of resources (CPU, memory, storage, traffic) and rightsized resources, enabling you to optimize as you move your workloads to the cloud. Flexera calculates cloud costs across multiple clouds and regions, enabling you to find the best placement for each business service or application you migrate. Finally, Flexera lets you see the impact of cloud discounts, such as reserved instances, so you can assess the actual costs and plan for the level of commitments you make to a particular cloud vendor.

6. Prioritize and plan your migration

Once your unbiased assessment is complete, you can prioritize which applications should move to which clouds and which shouldn’t, then group those applications into waves based on your timeline for migration. Flexera integrates ROI tools from AWS, Azure, and Google, as well as a wide array of migration utilities such as Cloud Endure, Velostrata or River Meadows, which can be used to perform the actual lift and shift of workloads. Flexera puts you in the driver’s seat, with the ability to perform an unbiased cloud migration assessment and compare options from multiple cloud providers.