IT-Conductor Blog

Performance and configuration baselines are critical in understanding the current state of your application environment prior to migrating to the cloud. Without generating cloud baselines, it would be difficult for you to measure your cloud migration success.

Most organizations understand the importance of having a concrete plan and strategy when migrating to the cloud. In the article we've published recently, we've recommended starting your cloud migration journey by setting business objectives and establishing key performance indicators (KPIs). These two play a significant role in defining your cloud migration success. However, establishing KPIs and benchmarking metrics will be an uphill task if you don't have a complete understanding of all of your IT assets, applications, services, and the interdependencies among all of them. For this very reason, we've introduced the Discover stage as part of the cloud migration strategy we've been utilizing in IT-Conductor.

Security in any cloud environment is a shared responsibility between the organization and the cloud provider. The distribution of responsibilities between the two would depend on the cloud model implemented (i.e. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), services in use, and applicable security compliance requirements. But on a more general note, the cloud provider is responsible for securing the cloud itself while the customer is responsible for securing their data within the cloud.

Defining cloud migration success starts with setting business objectives and establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) that should meet what the business aims to achieve. In agile, think of business objectives as the Definition of Done where deliverables are discussed with the teams involved to build a common understanding of work completion. On the other hand, think of KPIs as acceptance criteria that need to be satisfied before a particular deliverable can be considered complete.

Migrating databases to the cloud requires rigorous planning especially when it involves mission-critical applications like SAP. From understanding the source application environment up until the deployment of application components in the target cloud environment and monitoring your newly migrated systems on the cloud, you need to plan your database migration with more thoroughness and precision.

Cloud migration may sound as simple as migrating resources from a physical to a virtual infrastructure. However, migrating to the cloud means a lot of different things. While it's true, in concept, that you move resources from on-premises to a virtualized environment, it is not as straightforward as it looks like. It can mean migrating resources to a private or a public cloud. Moreover, virtualization can exist without cloud computing, but not the other way around.

Building observable systems require understanding the concept of observability and its three pillars—metrics, logs, and traces. However, implementing a solution based solely on the three pillars is not enough. There is more to observability that goes beyond gathering data and making sense of it.

Application Performance Management (APM) tools have evolved along with the modernization of applications and IT infrastructures. From simply monitoring the availability and performance of legacy applications to having the ability to discover and analyze distributed systems, we found ourselves in dire need to understand systems and applications on a much deeper level.

For the past two years, we have seen how the COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to adapt to the new ways of working. As we continue to live in this new normal, organizations should carry on with modernizing applications, discovering new capabilities, and building operational resiliency. Cloud transformation unfolds several opportunities to level-up operations, making it a necessity in today's workplace environment. However, moving to the cloud as we know it is an uphill task for both large and small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). This 2022, we recommend looking at cloud transformation with an agile mindset and start delivering value to your business right away.

The holiday season is just around the corner which means organizations are now starting to operate with a skeleton workforce, including SAP Basis teams. Providing 24/7 support imposes a challenge given manpower is limited, even more so when monitoring is all over the place.