By Roman Martin, Solutions Engineer, CloudSphere
One of the most common issues organizations experience when trying to migrate their IT estate to any cloud environment is not knowing what they own.
Until you can clearly identify each and every component of your environments, effectively migrating your estate comes with risk: risk of data breaches, service interruption, and losing internal accessibility.
As an entirely SaaS-based product, CloudSphere is an effective, easy-to-use digital transformation tool that can be leveraged by anyone, anywhere. With you throughout your entire journey, our product helps you discover, plan, migrate, optimize, modernize, and secure entire cloud environments with automated features that save businesses time, money and disruptions.
In this article, we’ll focus on that initial discovery phase and how CloudSphere can help you take that first important step in the process—uncovering what you own.
Uncovering What You Own with CloudSphere
When it comes to identifying what makes up your IT environments, CloudSphere alleviates the need for you and your team to manually evaluate your estates. This helps move the process along faster, with fewer opportunities for human error.
During the discovery process, we scan all of your environments or your customer’s environments on your behalf. CloudSphere does all the heavy lifting for you and presents your data in a way that’s easy to understand.
To begin this phase of the process, all you need to do is deploy a small appliance to collect your data, so that CloudSphere can:
- Analyze all of your environments
- Process the data and identify your applications
- Present your IT estates in an easy-to-digest way
At CloudSphere, we’re not just looking at things at one level. Our platform evaluates and presents your data on a multitude of levels. So, once we’ve collected all of your data, we take a look at your IT estate both horizontally and vertically. Then we scan your environments for any dependencies.
Horizontal Evaluation
Horizontally, we collect data across many environments. This can include your legacy Unix estate, more modern virtualisation deployments like VMware, Hyper V, or other virtualized environments.
We can even analyze more modern public cloud environments. If you have a preexisting estate that runs in something like Azure, AWS or GCP, we can collect data around what’s running in that environment, suck it all up, and then present it back in a way that’s easily digestible.
Vertical Evaluation
We then approach your data vertically. In the CloudSphere platform, you can see a top-level summary of the environment, as well as breakdown summaries.
Our product can scan any number of servers, physical or virtual. Then, we use that information to recognize the actual applications that are running on top of those servers. These are database technologies like SQL, Oracle, IBM Db2, or web frontends like IaaS, Tomcat, and Kafka.
Dependencies Evaluation
The final piece of the puzzle we look for are those dependencies. These are the interactions between your applications.
From there, we start to piece together a service, which is your full application stack. An example of a service or application stack is a web interface that talks to some kind of middleware component, that then talks to a backend database, and is further augmented by the underlying servers that host the stack. This full stack allows us to show you a very, very granular presentation of your data and what you own.
What’s the Next Step in Your Migration?
Once you understand what you own, what happens next? Watch my Tech Bite video below for a full platform overview and to learn what happens after the discovery process.
The Tech Bite videos are a new series from CloudSphere. Each short video discusses industry hot topics and how CloudSphere helps you and your tech teams solve many of today’s digital transformation challenges.
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About Roman Martin
As one of our Solutions Engineers, Roman Martin is a member of Cloudsphere’s go-to-market and strategy team for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In this role, he manages key partnerships and drives net-new business across some of the top hyperscalers around the globe.
Connect with Roman on LinkedIn.
About CloudSphere
CloudSphere makes digital transformations easy by offering automation and clarity of IT estates. We empower our partners and customers to Discover, Plan, Migrate, Optimize, Modernize, and Secure entire cloud environments with automated features that save businesses time, money and disruptions.
