AHP based application portfolio assessment for Cloud migration

Cloud computing promises myriad benefits for enterprises including operational excellence through reduction of CAPEX and OPEX, faster processing of internet scale data, increased business agility. However there are considerable concern and skepticism because of varied reasons like security issues, loss of control over applications, compliance risks and lack of standards. Thus Cloud’s economies of scale, elasticity and flexibility can both be a friend or foe based on how it is put to practice in an enterprise. Some of the questions businesses need to ask themselves before undertaking cloud initiatives are:

• What factors should be considered for cloud enablement of enterprise applications? How to judge different competing priorities?
•  How to identify applications and services that are best suited for cloud migration based on business priority and technical fitment?
• How to prioritize applications and services for phase wise cloud enablement? How to avoid "gut feeling" and bring objectivity into the evaluation?
• What are the different risk involved?

There is a need, therefore, for an application portfolio assessment approach to evaluate enterprise applications suited for cloud environment.

Recently my article on how Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based multi-dimensional statistical approach can be used to undertake application portfolio assessment for cloud enablement got published on IBM developerWorks. The article explains different aspects of the assessment including criteria hierarchy definition, criteria prioritization and application scoring using examples and formula.

Read the full article.