Roadmap about migration of public services into the cloud
A step by step roadmap for Public Authorities to help them as they plan, determine effort and budget, select the appropriate services, make the required internal organisational changes and finally execute the migration into cloud.Selection of services and apps
As Public Authorities start migrating their applications to the Cloud, it is important to determine which applications fit better into this environment. Identifying and prioritising the best applications to be moved to the cloud means to consider and analyse different factors that have to do with the service/app itself (architecture, design, potential usage etc.), the experience and expectances of the responsible organisation, dependence on third party software etc. The selection of services should primarily be made based on the organisation’s objectives and needs, and for this, internal reviews might provide important insight.
An application must meet certain requirements to be considered as a good candidate for migration to the cloud. The best ones are applications, which take advantage of the elasticity of Cloud Computing. Based on the Cloud Standards Customer Council (2013) the most and less suitable applications for migration to cloud computing are the ones described in the following table (Table 5).
Suitable Candidates for Cloud | Less Suitable Candidates for Cloud |
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Table 3: Application Candidates for Migration to Cloud Computing. Source Cloud Standards Customer Council (2013, p. 7).
FACTORS AFFECTING THE SELECTION OF SERVICES FOR MIGRATION
Identifying and prioritising the best applications to be moved to the cloud means to consider and analyse different factors, such as:
- political priorities
- user driven aspects
- technical and legal specifications/ restrictions (including ownership, security, flexibility, level of maturity, language, documentation, target users etc.
In particular, the following type of applications will benefit from Cloud’s ability to automate the dynamic of resources to match the current demand:
- Applications that are designed to spread their workload across multiple servers.
- Applications that run occasionally but require significant computing resources when they run.
- Applications with unpredictable or cyclical usage patterns.
- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Applications.
For these type of applications, the rapid elasticity combined with the pay-by-usage characteristic of the cloud can lead to significant financial savings. For each of the services identified, the following table must be completed.
Type | Technologies |
---|---|
Operating Systems | |
Programming Languages | |
Databases | |
Web/Application Services | |
Frameworks | |
Applications Lifecycle Tools | |
Open Source Code Repository |
Table 4: Technical Information about candidate applications to migrate
Migration of services to the cloud means the possibility of other municipalities to access services and transfer them without the need to develop them from the scratch. Such a task includes the analysis of a different set of criteria such as i) documentation, ii) target users, iii) flexibility, iv) language, v) compliance with internal security regulations and vi) specifications.