Often minimum specs for an application exceed the actual usage profile of the organization. Reviewing CPU resource patterns are essential when choosing the appropriate cloud environment to match the availability and resource utilization requirements.

There are major cost implications if the application(s) are licensed differently than the public cloud platform you’re considering. It’s essential to understand if you can configure your cloud environment to match the applications you’re using from a licensing perspective.

The public cloud should provide agility to the organization, but without a proper understanding of each application’s architecture, the benefits of the migration may be slow to realization and prohibit the desired optimization. Which systems potentially could be difficult to scale and provide a greater response time?

The public cloud service provider may require the relaxing of some security policies. A balancing act oftentimes is required between the levels of security you are accustomed to and what you can implement during and after migration. What workarounds can be implemented to allow for concessions to have to be made?

The decision to move to a public cloud has many financial implications. You need a total cost analysis broken down by Compute, Storage, and Network – even at the machine-level. A “right sized” cloud environment maximizes the value of multiple instance types and configurations while providing insight into over and underutilized capacity within your existing environment and giving you tailored optimization recommendations.

Understanding the relationship between applications is a critical component of the migration road map when it comes to the sequence of application movement to minimize limited functionality and avoid outages. What application dependencies exist that need to be taken into account, or can a certain application remain in isolation while other systems are migrated?