An Approach for the Financial Viability Assessment of Cloud Migration Projects

Abstract

Organisations moving legacy applications to the public cloud are increasingly having to reassess their decisions post-migration due to budget overruns resulting from insufficient planning and limited understanding of the constraints with the public cloud operating model. To date, there has been limited research on the assessment of public cloud suitability for legacy applications, which can lead to incomplete analysis and inappropriate platform choices and high-risk cost estimates. To address these shortcomings, we extend our previously proposed Cloud Decision Framework by incorporating a generalised Financial Viability Assessment process and methodology to help decision-makers make more efficient and effective migration decisions. The framework includes an automated approach for financial viability assessment using predefined application sizes via a Parametric Estimation Model. The proposed approach is validated by application to two real-world, anonymised case studies with results indicating that it is more likely to reduce budget overruns and increase productivity compared to current approaches.