Cloud Assessment: Clarifying the Vision, Transforming the Organization

Cloud migration has become a tech buzzword across enterprises worldwide. However, to be an effective cloud user means not only getting introduced to the concept, but also thoroughly evaluating your existing IT infrastructure and processes, identifying their potential in moving to cloud, and effectively planning your migration strategy. Given the many advantages of migration, businesses are looking to tap into the long-term benefits of cloud computing, which include:

• Agility
• Cost savings
• Scalability
• Security
• Mobility

Conducting an objective and accurate assessment of their existing services, applications, security, and network infrastructure has been a challenge for organizations. Numerous discovery tools, including Cloudscape, Cloudamize, Device42, and TSO Logic, can help you understand your on-premise infrastructure.

Though these discovery tools do a good job in terms of understanding the infra estate as well as other basic information like CPU, RAM, disk storage, and OS, they have their own limitations. Mostly, the assessments are far from being accurate during and after migration. This is because the organizations do not go deeper in terms of understanding the applications and the business. The most common challenges of cloud migration are:

• Lack of a clear strategy that is determined by business objectives
• Not having a clear understanding of environments – including infrastructure, applications, and data
• Failure of crucial services and security weak points
• Lack of skilled labor and scope for human errors
• Exceeding a planned budget

Broad basing the discovery

The good news, however, is that none of these challenges are insurmountable. To make the migration process as smooth as possible, we need to discover or analyze the source code, configurations, applications, and databases too – and not just focus on infra discovery.

This helps to better understand the internal dependencies of applications and the roadblocks in the migration process. Both static and dynamic analyzers should be used together with the infra discovery tool to have a fail-proof migration.

As static analyzers help understand the components of applications and their dependencies on 3rd-party applications, it helps analyze the impact of re-platforming or refactoring the application. This is where AI and ML can be used in conjunction with these mechanisms to get a better understanding.

The ML and AI journey to cloud

With Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) in cloud becoming mainstream, organizations are able to overcome these challenges. AI/ML automatically generate insights from data. From predictive maintenance in manufacturing plants and fraud detection in financial services to accelerating scientific discovery, businesses of all types can benefit from this technology.

This has also given rise to applications such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and search engines that rival human interaction capabilities. As the dynamic and complex business environments of the modern times require a shift to data-driven decision making, there is a growing demand for robust, lineage, governance, and risk mitigation tactics. 

ID2C – Changing the game of data discovery

ID2C is TCS’ proprietary ML-driven tool, which combines discovery tool and static analyzers outputs along with other available data and intelligently deduces technology stack and dependencies to derive more value. This enables accurate identification of a variety of different technologies from different vendors even when they are seemingly disconnected. TCS’ AWS business unit conducts assessment projects worth $5M every year while influencing more than $100M foundation, migration, and operations projects.

AI/ML-driven data discovery combined with anomaly detection is a critical aspect of big data and cloud cost optimization and has the potential to save enterprises significant amounts of money. So why did we create an artificial intelligence-based platform for enhanced data discovery? Benefits include:

• A 30%-plus improvement in knowledge of some customer landscapes
• Proven faster and reliable cloud migrations – around 20% less rollbacks
• Estimated savings of $5M due to fewer rollbacks and first-time right migrations and assessment
• Improved assessment accuracy by at least 35%
• Improved technology stack identification – web server by 13%
• Improved runtime identification by 33%, and that of COTS products and its versions by 78% for a leading American insurance company 
• Improvements in database server performance by 43% for a leading snacking company

As cloud native transformations are being increasingly sought after, TCS’ ID2C tool built on AWS cloud helps enterprises in their cloud journey by helping understand the on-premise environment better and thereby derives correct strategies to transform their application portfolio now and in the future. 

Author Bio

Ph: +91 9731397076

E-mail: Guruprasad.kambaloor@tcs.com

Guruprasad Kambaloor works as a Chief Architect in the AWSBU division of TCS. Guru has a rich experience of 26+ years in the IT industry spanning many domains like Healthcare, Life Sciences, E&R, Banking, and multiple technologies like Cloud, IoT, Blockchain, Quantum Computing. Currently he heads the Platform Engineering for AWSBU which has built platforms like Cloud Counsel, Cloud Mason, Migration Factory, Exponence to name a few. His current interests are AI/ML, Quantum Computing, and its relevance/usage in Cloud.

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Cloud Computing