Cloud migration is exploding. In one survey, 93% of corporate respondents reported that their companies are using the cloud as part of their business solution. Amazon Web Services posted $3.53 billion in revenue from the fourth quarter of 2016. Yet, about 44% of organizations experience some form of cloud migration failure.
It appears leveraging the cloud is a lot easier than moving to the cloud. More importantly, there are misconceptions on the ease of migrating to the cloud. Sometimes experience is the best teacher, so having an experienced resource, both on the technical side and as a consultant, is ideal. Cloud migration doesn’t have to be a frustrating experience. Knowing what’s in-store is half the battle.
1. AVOIDING THE ALL OR NOTHING MINDSET
Many companies approach the cloud as if it is the solution for all of your company’s systems and applications. The truth is that not everything should make it to the cloud. Rather, it’s important to analyze what applications make sense for cloud migration and why.
Migrating to the cloud can provide better security or performance for some applications. Other applications may not warrant the investment. Some applications may not even be fit for the cloud, or even be compatible with a new operating system, for instance. Additionally, migrating your entire workload will require significant compute resources, keeping costs on par with more traditional infrastructure.
A thorough analysis of what makes sense to migrate to the cloud will save your company time, labor, and expense. It also allows resources to be allocated to other projects and initiatives. By avoiding the all or nothing mindset, you’ll open yourself up to the second tip:
2. FRAME CLOUD MIGRATION THROUGH THE LENS OF YOUR BUSINESS
Cloud migration should be first and foremost a business decision. Decide which applications are to migrate by first taking into account the overall goals of your company. Each application migrated should come with a benefit to that migration, such as an improvement to security, functionality, ability to innovate, or performance by refactoring.
Offloading some of the mundane tasks of your IT staff to a managed cloud provider may free your staff to concentrate on core competencies, generating profitable applications for your business. Additionally, outsourcing continuous monitoring will reduce risk, lower downtime, and help maintain compliance.
Every decision should have a positive impact on your business, whether it’s lowering your total cost of ownership or increasing your return on investment.
3. INITIATING PRE-MIGRATION ANALYSIS
When we dig into the number of migration fails, more than a fair share can be attributed to compatibility issues with the new cloud platform. Just as your laptop or personal computers need updates, moving to the cloud is like one big update, and not all applications may be compatible with this new update.
Pre-migration analysis and architectural reviews will answer this question for you, and allow for the opportunity to refactor parts or all of the architecture of an application to fit the new platform. While pre-migration analysis requires some extra budgeted time, it’s the best way to discover critical issues you may face with an application while still allowing time for a fix.
4. PREPARING YOUR APPLICATIONS
Legacy applications can be notoriously difficult to migrate to the cloud. A lift and shift approach is common for cloud migration, but it’s not always cost-efficient and can lead to migration failure with legacy applications – they may not be compatible with cloud architecture. A refactoring of your legacy applications may be required before migrating to ensure compatibility.
5. CHOOSING THE RIGHT CLOUD PARTNER
The right cloud vendor can be the biggest factor for a successful cloud migration. Look for a vendor that is well established with an excellent track record. Do they have high security standards? A full range of services? Do they offer 24/7 monitoring? How quick are they to handle, or better yet, proactively address an issue before it becomes a problem?
SO, WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOUR CLOUD MIGRATION?
Corporate Technologies Group can help you find success with your cloud solution.
Corporate Technologies Group is vendor-agnostic. We have strategic partnerships with over 140 different Cloud, VoIP, and WAN network service providers. We support clients from network design to implementation, post-installation support and remediation. We can ensure your infrastructure is built to suit your business needs now and into the future.
At Corporate Technologies Group, we provide our clients with a white glove service in evaluating, selecting, implementing, and post install support of their technology that runs their business. Our goal is to provide expertise to help clients figure out how to stay out of harm’s way and allow clients the ability to have one point of support along with taking away the pain points associated with technology.
In short, We make the complicated and risking technology decision simple.