In today’s rapidly evolving IT landscape, organizations face mounting pressure to migrate their data centers to the cloud. However, this transition often presents significant challenges, particularly when it comes to understanding the complete picture of existing application environments. This article explores how comprehensive application discovery can transform your VMware migration journey and deliver tangible business benefits.
The Industry Challenge: Incomplete Environmental Data
Most migration projects suffer from a critical shortcoming: they fail to capture sufficient environmental data about application workloads. This oversight creates blind spots that can derail even the most carefully planned cloud migrations. Without visibility into how applications function, their dependencies, and resource requirements, organizations risk costly delays, performance issues, and potential business disruptions.
Traditional migration approaches often focus solely on infrastructure components while neglecting the applications that drive business value. This infrastructure-centric view provides only part of the story, leaving organizations vulnerable to unexpected complications during and after migration.
In fact, according to research by Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia:
- 83% of organizations are allocating significant planning efforts to ensure that new applications are deployed in the optimal location.[1]
- 73% of IT decision-makers reported that their organization’s application deployment planning is being hindered by a lack of visibility into specifics on spending for public cloud services.
Gaining Valuable Workload Insights
Application workload discovery provides essential insights into how applications consume resources, their performance patterns, and usage trends. This data enables migration teams to right-size cloud environments, preventing over-provisioning that leads to unnecessary costs or under-provisioning that results in performance issues.
With detailed workload analysis, organizations can make informed decisions about which applications should be rehosted, refactored, rearchitected, rebuilt, or replaced based on actual utilization data rather than assumptions.
Mapping Application Dependencies
Applications rarely operate in isolation. They form complex webs of dependencies on databases, middleware, APIs, and other services. Without understanding these connections, migration efforts can inadvertently break critical business functions.
Creating Service Maps for Clearer Planning
Service maps translate technical dependencies into business-relevant visualizations, bridging the gap between IT and business stakeholders. These maps illustrate how technical services support business processes, helping prioritize migration waves based on business impact rather than technical convenience.
Addressing Application End-of-Life Considerations
Application discovery often reveals opportunities to retire legacy applications approaching end-of-life. Among other benefits, this identification process helps organizations eliminate unnecessary migration costs for soon-to-be-retired applications, identify security vulnerabilities from unsupported software, and reduce technical debt by sun-setting obsolete technologies.
Mapping to Cloud Modernization Recommendations
With comprehensive application data, organizations can create tailored modernization recommendations for each application. These insights guide decisions about:
- Which applications are candidates for containerization
- When to leverage cloud-native services versus maintaining existing architectures
- Opportunities to consolidate similar applications
- Potential performance improvements through architecture changes
Aligning with Cloud Managed Recommendations
Cloud providers offer optimization recommendations based on workload patterns. However, these recommendations only become valuable when you have comprehensive data about your applications. Application discovery provides benefits including comparing current state against provider best practices and identifying opportunities for auto-scaling based on usage patterns.
Ensuring Application OS Compatibility
Cloud migration often involves changes to underlying operating systems. Application discovery helps identify potential compatibility issues by:
- Flagging applications with OS dependencies that require special attention
- Identifying custom libraries or drivers that need migration planning
- Uncovering hard-coded paths or configurations that may break during migration
- Revealing outdated OS components that require remediation
The Bottom Line: Significant Cost Savings
Organizations that conduct thorough application discovery typically realize 20-30% greater cost savings compared to those relying on infrastructure-only discovery.
Maximizing Cloud Managed Services Benefits
Cloud migration isn’t just about lifting and shifting workloads—it’s about leveraging cloud-native capabilities. Application discovery helps organizations:
- Identify candidates for managed database services
- Recognize opportunities for serverless architectures
- Determine which applications would benefit from containers and orchestration
- Plan for appropriate backup, recovery, and business continuity services
Mitigating Migration Risk
Perhaps the most compelling business value of application discovery is risk reduction. Comprehensive visibility helps organizations anticipate and prevent potential application failures during migration. This also helps establish realistic expectations with business stakeholders.
Conclusion: Visibility Using Cloudsphere as the Foundation for Migration Success
The journey to the cloud begins with visibility. By investing in comprehensive application discovery for your VMware migration, your organization gains the insights needed to make informed decisions, reduce costs, mitigate risks, and accelerate cloud adoption.
Don’t let your migration become another statistic of partial success or outright failure. Start with a complete picture of your application landscape using Cloudsphere’s Illuminate360 platform, and build your migration strategy on a foundation of knowledge rather than assumptions.
[1] Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Cloud Application Deployment and Migration Decision-making, August 2024. All Enterprise Strategy Group research references in this Showcase are from this report unless otherwise noted.
