Determining the Value of Applications to Your Business

We are continuing to lay the proper groundwork for determining a meaningful cost comparison between the cloud and your On Premise resources. We last discussed finding your current infrastructure costs and how to determine your applications’ true resource requirements: Finding Your Current Cost and the Pitfalls That Inhibit You from Finding It. Moving forward, let’s determine the business value of your applications. In order to determine this, many questions must be asked. Most importantly, it’s the people who are answering these questions that will create a true picture of each application’s value. These answers are not solely given by IT but are found with the business owners or units that require the application.  We’ve been amazed by the number of IT Managers/Directors that can’t tell which apps are mission critical and even which line of business is the most critical. Today, both business drivers and IT need to be on the same page. They need to think of the big picture and work towards the business goals together.

Introduction:

It feels like everyday we see one statistic after another about how many businesses are migrating to the cloud, or strategizing to migrate to the cloud, or thinking about strategizing to migrating to the cloud. These numbers get larger and larger as the years are tacked on and only time will tell if these predictions are right. But today, we can only control what is in the NOW.

Yes, this is the exact title we used to start this blog series and we found it fitting to use it again for our conclusion. We are bringing you back back full circle to where we began. Through this series we’ve discussed:

Without the symmetric environment, Test-Dev is very convoluted. It’s disjointed. With coding for the exceptions as the rule, the full System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is disjointed as well. It takes a lot of time and energy to run applications through an asymmetric environment with all its bits and pieces, and it makes running an app from start to finish as difficult as putting together IKEA furniture without instructions.

We’ve discussed the challenges and complex problems DevOps encounters in an asymmetric environment, so let’s flip the script and discuss the efficiencies and improvements a symmetric environment can offer in DevOps. Before we do that, let’s review DevOps again and the definition of symmetry.