• Fast time to value—the bank is now achieving six to eight weeks per application
• Reduced overall process cost

Given Appian’s continued approach of developing the platform and adding new features, the bank has a partner it feels comfortable moving forward with, expanding to meet current and future needs.

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FinOps is a method of bringing financial accountability to the cloud’s operational expense (OpEx) spending model. This new way of handling financial operations allows distributed IT teams, development, and finance to work together to enable faster product delivery while managing and predicting costs.

FinOps is different from the traditional IT procurement capital expense (CapEx) model. Instead of finance allocating budgets to product teams, a cross-functional FinOps team coordinates technology, business, and finance to optimize cloud vendor management, service rates, and discounting. It’s all about establishing financial accountability in cloud spending.

The GigaOm report, “Key Criteria for Evaluating Financial Operations (FinOps) Tools,” outlined issues, trends, and purchase considerations for prospective customers. It identified key criteria and evaluation metrics for selecting a FinOps platform. This companion Radar report recognizes the vendors and products that excel in their FinOps offerings.

This FinOps Radar report provides a forward-looking analysis that carefully plots the relative value and progression of the various FinOps solutions available in the market. Factors such as strategy and execution are evaluated for each vendor. In addition, highlights of each offering are presented in a short summary.

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The range of vendors offering performance testing solutions is diverse and strong, with Leaders found in every quadrant of this Radar report. Providers positioned further from the center of the Radar may nevertheless offer the best solution for an enterprise’s needs and constraints, whether that be capabilities for testing as code, observability, automated root cause analysis, collaboration, scalability, chaos engineering, advanced load type testing, ease of reporting, real browser-based testing, or the ability to work with open-source tools, simulate network traffic impairments, or implement “shift left” testing.

This is the second year GigaOm has evaluated performance testing tools. Our 2021 Radar report included both cloud-based and on-premises tools. However, for this year’s report, we focused on cloud-based performance testing tools exclusively.

All the solutions assessed in this report are cloud-oriented and offer faster speeds and better affordability than on-premises solutions do, especially for large testing loads. They’re being developed at a fast pace; democratization of load testing and automated test creation are two ongoing trends to watch. Most of the solutions evaluated here offer either graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to manage tests or ways to record users navigating the application to create load testing scripts automatically.

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This review is focused on cloud-based load testing solutions in which the ability to scale is based on leveraging hyperscale cloud economics and allowing usage based billing. This approach expands the ease of use for load testing and removes the need to schedule projects to use limited on-premises testing capacity. This movement to cloud testing allows for an API-level of interaction between developers and testing capacity. It also provides automated, low cost ways for operational teams to test applications before and after changes to corporate infrastructure. This testing in the cloud reduces the need to have large pools of people online during a change control event to ensure their application still works after the change or that a change fixes the issue that initially required the change.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report identifies the common features needed to make a solution viable (table stakes), details the capabilities that differentiate products (key criteria), and highlights important evaluation metrics for selecting an effective cloud performance testing platform. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those criteria and factors. Together, these reports provide an overview of the category and its underlying technology, identify leading cloud performance testing offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these platforms so they can make a more informed investment decision.

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Ripping and replacing applications is no longer feasible, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify for organizations struggling to cope with shrinking budgets. Technology decision makers need to decide what to do with these legacy applications. Three main choices are available: maintain the status quo and do nothing; migrate and modernize the applications to a modern, cloud-based environment; or rewrite and replace them. While the third option might appear to be the optimal solution at first glance, the overheads in terms of the effort, time, and cost required to rewrite what could amount to thousands of applications may not always be the best approach.

To help technology decision makers understand some of the dynamics behind modernizing applications, we conducted a field test to assess the benefits and costs of application migration. This is a repeat of a test that we ran last year, as we wanted to ensure that migrating legacy applications was still a feasible option. The field test walks through a migration scenario and evaluates its costs, performance, and benefits. The results were similar to the previous test, and they reinforced the following:

• Significant cost savings can be achieved by migrating applications to the cloud from on-premises infrastructures.
• Traditional .NET applications can benefit from such migration without refactoring underlying code.
• The Microsoft Azure solution offered a potential total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of up to 54% over running on-premises and 35% over running on AWS.
• Streamlined operations, simplified administration, and proximity to advanced cloud services are additional benefits.
• Built-in tools for Visual Studio and MSSQL Manager provide ease of use for database and application migrations.

For an exercise of this nature, it is critical to use legacy applications for the migration to the cloud, as this is a scenario that many organizations find themselves in, with the need to balance the application’s requirements against the potential advantages of the cloud.

The field study looked specifically at .NET applications, which allowed different approaches to migration to be assessed, looking at the advantages and disadvantages of each. We discovered that moving to Microsoft Azure has a measurable TCO advantage over Amazon Web Services—with cost savings of 35% when applying Azure Hybrid Benefit (AHB) licensing—and that Azure offers additional benefits in terms of ease of migration. (Figure 1)

Figure 1. Three-Year Total Estimated Operating Cost

We concluded that any cloud migration frees up considerable time and resources to work on more strategic tasks that drive value to the business rather than maintaining resource-heavy applications. As a result, we can say that modernization may be viewed as an imperative element of a forward-thinking application strategy. The best starting point is to evaluate existing applications and determine the best migration strategy for each, based on priority.

The post Costs and Benefits of .NET Application Migration to the Cloud appeared first on Gigaom.

• You may be able to lower your operating costs or at least slow their rate of growth, while reducing or eliminating the expense of physical data centers.
• The ability to scale resources quickly means that the business can be more agile, responding to changing needs and expanding into new markets with less risk.

The benefits of cloud migration are not a given. For IT shops versed in the rhythms of on-premises operations, the transition to the cloud presents unfamiliar challenges. Selecting a cloud vendor is significantly different than the process of choosing a data center provider. And despite historical promises from service providers of increased agility, lower cost, and risk, migrating even a single complex application to the cloud is a major challenge. The obstacles range from the deeply technical to issues relating to operations and management, and to managing the change itself.

Whatever the reasons, organizations are constantly looking at their past migrations with the benefit of hindsight to answer the question, “Why didn’t I get it right the first time?” As the old Irish adage goes, “If you want to get there, don’t start from here.” This report helps you start from the right place, exploring the processes and technologies needed for a successful cloud migration. Three areas of focus are addressed:

• Base-level agreements between business units and IT
• Core and differentiating cloud provider capabilities
• Evaluating a provider in terms of required success factors

Success not only means addressing these needs, but also defeating potential roadblocks in advance. Let’s first consider what needs to be in place between IT and the business.

The post Key Criteria and Strategies for Cloud Migration Success appeared first on Gigaom.

There is no one-size-fits-all DevOps solution for software delivery—teams must self-equip with the technology, processes and skills shaped to their needs for agility without sacrificing flexibility. Additionally, proactive security and quality practices must be seamlessly integrated across pipelines to ensure governance and compliance without sacrificing time to market.

As such, IT organizations must ensure common services are able to be consumed programmatically. A common platform built on a common framework can help cross-functional teams make challenges visible and resolve them more quickly. Honeywell addressed these needs by adopting a no-code DevOps orchestration platform to wrangle tool sprawl and enable cross-functional IT and business personas to move as one team with shared metrics and outcomes.

This webinar shares ways to optimize the business value of DevOps through an exploration of Honeywell’s transformation journey using Opsera’s platform to gain 100% automation of CI/CD pipelines, 65% reduction in cycle times, 30% productivity savings, and more.

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The latest iteration of Microsoft’s Azure App Service Environment (v3), includes capabilities that make it worth considering for such scenarios. App Service Environment (ASE) follows a Platform as a Service (PaaS) approach, offering comprehensive application and service frameworks upon which engineers can build application business logic. Unlike multi-tenant implementations of PaaS, App Service Environment consists of a single tenant instance through which customer traffic and cloud management traffic operate on separate virtual networks, with compute instances dedicated to customers.

This approach is particularly compelling for regulated industries. With App Service Environment v3, organizations can operate cloud-based services within a protected, policy-based environment. In addition, it offers a managed application ecosystem that separates operation and lifecycle management from application traffic. Consequently, cloud-based services can be operated and managed in the same way as in-house applications running behind the corporate firewall.

ASE v3 allows compliance-oriented verticals to fully leverage cloud-based services. They can deploy and manage applications at lower cost and with less technical know-how, unleashing the potential of cloud-based applications and opening the door to digital transformation. Outside of regulated industries, any business with large-scale corporate policies also can gain the agility and scalability of cloud-based services without losing control or risking non-compliance.

In this report, prepared for CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, chief architects and VPs of Engineering, we consider what Microsoft’s App Service Environment offering looks like in practice. We outline the key needs of compliance-oriented scenarios, looking at how the platform’s capabilities map onto these needs. Based on these scenarios, along with end-user research, we map out lessons and strategies for making the most of App Service Environment v3 in the compliance context.

In conclusion, we determine that App Service Environment v3 does indeed offer a way forward for regulated organizations as they look to embrace the digital transformation benefits that the cloud can bring.

The post Using App Service Environment v3 in Compliance-Oriented Industries appeared first on Gigaom.

Hybrid clouds are either the end goal or a transition method to get to a cloud-only hosting model. A CPM vendor that can manage your on-premises automation and orchestration needs as well as the cloud hosting provides a greater value than separate tools that only do either on-premises or public cloud deployments.

More comprehensive CMP vendors also manage storage, security, disaster recovery, system health and performance, and application lifecycle management. These are just a few examples of the functions that must now be managed across multiple planes while accounting for multiple, and often differing, requirements—e.g., cloud vs. on-premises, hardware vs. software, ephemeral vs. persistent storage.

As organizations move more applications to the cloud, the need for a high-level “single view” of the entire infrastructure becomes critical to ensure uptime and high performance without compromising data mobility and security. A new role of cloud operations manager has evolved to oversee hybrid cloud deployments using CMPs. This role has evolved as a superset of responsibilities that include any lower-level roles that manage a cloud contract or data center.

There are three aspects to total cloud management:

1. Automation = CMP
2. Application performance optimization = Cloud Resource Optimization
3. Financial accountability = FinOps

This report focuses on the automation of cloud management platforms needed to support application deployments.

Figure 1: Three Aspects of Total Cloud Management

As hybrid cloud deployments are the new norm, businesses of every size are leveraging CMPs to streamline cloud migration and ongoing operational needs. Though these types of infrastructures introduce more complexity, they also create more

opportunities to deliver value, primarily by using best-of-breed solutions.

Previously, essential functions such as asset tracking and dependency maps ran in data centers with redundancy to mitigate fallout from environmental outages and ensure elevated levels of uptime. The move to cloud requires a new paradigm, however, in which “design for failure” becomes an application requirement and not the infrastructure mandate.

The fact is, today the hardware is ephemeral, and we can’t use a physical server’s asset tag to track where an application is running, which is how traditional management tools worked. The move to virtual machines (VMs) on-premises and now to the cloud means that the focus must be on the business problem or solution itself and that other attributes be treated as short-lived. CMPs can manage the types of storage and flag inconsistencies in deployment requests to policy governance to ensure the type of storage and the characteristics of storage match the business expectations and governance requirements.

A CMP’s ability to track services at a high level is critical to the multi-year management needs of IT as organizations move to hybrid and multiple clouds.

This report evaluates key vendors in the cloud management space and equips IT decision-makers with the information they need to select providers according to their specific needs. We analyze the vendors on a set of key criteria and evaluation metrics, which are described in-depth in the Key Criteria Report for Cloud Management Platforms.

The post GigaOm Radar for Cloud Management Platforms appeared first on Gigaom.

Enterprises today must deal with a wide variety of far-flung users and disparate systems, and must be able to provision and support them both, safely and efficiently, However, few enterprise IT organizations know how to manage multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, let alone with the agility today’s businesses demand. Cloud management platforms (CMPs) enable customers to manage their complex environments more efficiently and with less cost.

Cloud management has three aspects that can be separate tools or intergrated to some level. The three areas are automation, operational optimization, and financial optimization and reporting. The names of these three groups are Cloud Management Platform, Cloud Resource Optimization, and Financial Operations (FinOps). The following graphic shows how these areas relate. This report covers Cloud Management Platforms, and GigaOm has other reports on the other two topics.

Figure 1: Three Aspects of Total Cloud Management

This Gigaom Key Criteria report details the key issues and trends to consider around the use of CMPs. Indeed, we’ll identify key criteria and evaluation metrics for selecting a management tool platform as well as identify vendors and products that excel. This report will give you an overview of the key enabling technology that can be obtained today and will help decision-makers evaluate existing platforms and decide where to invest.

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