Planning a Cloud Migration with Digital Experience Monitoring

In our first installment of this blog series, we went over the different types of applications migrated to the cloud and the benefits IT organizations hope to achieve by moving applications to the cloud.

Unfortunately, IT can’t just press a button or even whip up a few lines of code to move applications to the cloud. Like any strategic move by IT, a cloud migration requires advanced planning. That planning should start by asking and answering these three questions:

1. How does the application currently perform?
2. How will moving the application impact users? Will there be more or less latency?
3. Can the corporate network support the additional bandwidth requirements that using the cloud will create?

We’re naturally focusing on performance here because we’re a performance monitoring company. But performance is an all too common pitfall of cloud migration. That’s because many organizations don’t plan adequately for the impact on the enterprise network and end users of moving applications and workloads to the cloud.

So what should you be measuring? We recommend taking these five factors into consideration:

1. Average Wait Time: the average time it takes a web page or application to load.
2. Cost & Throughput: the cost of provisioning cloud resources and the amount of data being accessed from the cloud.
3. Response Time/Latency: the amount of time it takes for site or application to respond to a user request.
4. Geo Load Balancing: the ability to distribute application requests across cloud resources in multiple geographies.
5. Allocation of resources: efficient use of cloud resources to deliver optimum performance.

While cloud migration planning can be difficult, there are tools that can help. With its synthetic monitoring capabilities, Catchpoint can measure page load times, response times and transaction complete times from a global network of nearly 600 nodes, taking into account APIs, network and complex distributed Internet infrastructure such as DNS, CDNs, and site acceleration services. This will help you evaluate the cloud services from the end user’s perspective, see how your local network and Internet services impact performance of applications running in the cloud, and benchmark the performance of your applications and services.

To learn more, stay tuned for the next installment of this blog series or download our new ebook, Using Digital Experience Monitoring to Guide Cloud Migrations.