A Clearer Path to the Cloud: 4 Benefits of an App Assessment
Jun 08, 2021
When the applications you rely on to run your business start slowing down, it may be time to consider moving your app to the cloud. But if you’ve been using and patching the same software for 10 or 15 years, it can be challenging to know where to begin.
That’s where app assessments come in. This vital phase of the application migration journey helps you plan smarter and ensure your migration delivers a satisfying end-product. In this blog, we’ll explain what app assessments are and then offer four keys ways that they can benefit your business.
What Is an App Assessment?
Before you figure out where you’re going, you need to have a good sense of where you are now. App assessments allow your team to evaluate your application’s current state from a technical and end-user perspective.
There are a few critical questions to ask during your app assessment from a technical point of view. What is in your application’s stack, and what is the state of that stack? How often do you need to patch the application? How much time and money are you spending on those patches? Your team should also consider how your application functions within your organization’s infrastructure. What does your app rely on, and what relies on it? An app assessment helps you determine what other pieces of your infrastructure might need to shift during migration.
An app assessment also helps you determine how your application is performing from an end-user perspective. For some companies, this might not be a priority—either because your end users are happy with the current product or because your app doesn’t have a significant user interface. But if end users are a motivator for your use case, you’ll want to determine their pain points, how the current app meets their needs, and what gaps exist in your current offering that you can address during migration. An app assessment can help you determine whether UX is an important part of your migration, and how your existing application meets your user’s needs.
4 Benefits of an App Assessment
App assessments are an essential part of migration planning because they ensure your migrated application operates efficiently, effectively, and with your end-user in mind. Here are four ways app assessments can benefit your business:
Save money with open-source software
With today’s abundance of open-source software, your team no longer needs to build an app from scratch – and that saves you time and money. An app assessment helps your team determine which parts of your application need to be upgraded, so you can find the best open-source code to meet those needs.
By moving to an open-source model, your team saves the time it would typically take to write your own code, allowing your engineers to focus on more mission-critical projects. And, if you are currently paying licensing fees, you will significantly reduce the cost to operate your app year-over-year. The high quality of today’s open-source software means your application will work securely and efficiently – while staying flexible and scalable so you can easily upgrade in the future.Improve efficiency
Chances are your current application isn’t running as efficiently as it could be. If your stack is out of date and patches are the only thing keeping your app afloat, you probably spend more time and money than you should on upkeep and maintenance costs. An app assessment allows you to document and address these areas of inefficiency. Rather than taking a reactive approach and patching your app whenever you find a bug, app assessments enable your team to think proactively about how the app contributes to your organization. This holistic approach allows you to make changes during migration to improve efficiency in the long term.Enhance user experience
For many companies, end-user experience is a primary motivator for migrating apps to the cloud. An app assessment can help your company evaluate which improvements will address your end users’ pain points and add value for your company. When you do this work ahead of time, you can ensure that your migration will improve user experience.Customize your migration journey
Every application migration is unique. An app assessment helps you establish the specific business priorities for your project while factoring in your limitations, like budget and timeline, so you can plan a migration journey that works for your unique organization. Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach, app assessments ask what is most important to your team, giving you the intel you need to customize your migration.
Finding Clarity in the Cloud
App migration doesn’t have to feel daunting. With an app assessment, your team will have a clearer picture of your current state, so you can migrate your applications with confidence – and reap the many benefits of a more efficient, more user-friendly app.
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Learn more:
Are you exploring app migration and looking for an expert partner to help? The team at Enquizit can help you evaluate your current offerings and plan the best path forward, with deep knowledge of open-source software offerings, user-experience design, and more.
Asim Iqbal
Asim is Enquizit’s CTO and a member of the founding team. He has been an SME on security, storage, and resilience as well as Enquizit’s Lead Architect and VP of Solution Architecture. Among his professional endeavors is the implementation of a weather modeling HPC setup for Environment Canada, storage design and implementation for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind’s library, Media ingestion, encryption, and transcoding architecture for Bell Satellite TV, Cloud infrastructure, resilience, and security architecture and implementation for The Common Application and complete migration of Harvard Business Review’s Primary and DR data center to AWS. He maintains a strong personal interest in frictionless technical designs focused on end-user happiness and employee satisfaction, still thinks that ‘Data Availability Architect’ (from his early days working with HPE) is the coolest certification title ever and is an ex-CISSP. He neither confirms nor denies his purported afflictions with coffee, slow travel, and cats with unbridled spirits.
