Application Portfolio Management (APM) Best Practices

Overview

Cloud-first strategies - organizational mandates to migrate applications to cloud infrastructure without application-by-application assessment of cloud fitness, cost economics, and migration risk - frequently produce cloud migrations that are more expensive than anticipated, less performant than expected, and more complex than planned due to dependencies and architectural characteristics not assessed before the migration commitment was made. Applications that are genuinely cloud-ready migrate efficiently and realize their expected benefits. Applications that are architecturally ill-suited are migrated anyway, at significant cost, producing cloud deployments that are often more expensive to operate than their on-premises predecessors.

Best Practice

Develop a cloud adoption strategy driven by evidence-based portfolio analysis of individual application readiness, cost economics, and migration risk rather than blanket mandates that apply uniformly regardless of application characteristics. For each application being considered for cloud migration, conduct an assessment of cloud readiness, cost benefit potential, migration complexity, and migration cost before making a migration commitment. Applications that are cloud-ready with clear cost or operational benefits should be prioritized. Applications that are architecturally ill-suited, handle data with residency constraints that complicate cloud deployment, or whose estimated migration cost exceeds projected benefit over a reasonable horizon should be evaluated on their individual merits rather than migrated by mandate.

Benefit(s)

A portfolio-analysis-driven cloud adoption strategy produces cloud migrations that deliver their expected economic and operational benefits. Cloud investment is directed to applications where it produces the greatest return on migration investment. Applications that are poor cloud candidates remain on-premises or are appropriately refactored before migration rather than being migrated in a form that produces costs exceeding their on-premises predecessors. The organization develops a realistic, evidence-based cloud adoption roadmap that leadership can invest in with confidence and that produces the business outcomes the cloud strategy was designed to achieve.