Retire

While migrating to the cloud, you may discover the following:

• Rarely used applications
• Applications consuming an excessive amount of server capacity
• Applications that may not be required due to cloud incompatibility

In such a situation, you may want to retire the existing workload and take a fresh approach, which is more cloud-native.

A retirement strategy can be applied to hosts and applications that are soon going to be decommissioned. This can also be applied to unnecessary and redundant hosts and applications. Depending on your business needs, such applications can be decommissioned on-premises without even migrating to the cloud. Hosts and applications that are commonly suited for retirement include the following:

• On-premise servers and storage for disaster recovery purposes
• Server consolidation to resolve redundancies
• Duplicate resources due to mergers and acquisitions
• Alternative hosts in a typical high-availability setup
• Third-party licensed tools such as workload monitoring and automation, which is available as in-built capabilities in the cloud

Most migration projects employ multiple strategies, and there are different tools available for each strategy. The migration strategy will influence the time it takes to migrate and how the applications are grouped for the migration process.

Cloud migration is a good time to examine your overall inventory and get rid of the ghost server running under the developer desk and going unaccounted for. Often, the customer sees the typically unseen advantage of optimizing the workload and tightening security while running application discovery to prepare for migration. There are multiple phases involved in cloud migration. In the next section, you will learn about the steps for cloud migration.