Moving to the cloud can provide great benefits such as scalability, flexibility, and costs. However, cloud migrations are very complex, too. If you don’t plan and run your project carefully, you’re going to face delays, cost overruns, security issues, etc.
To successfully transition to the cloud, you need to get seven key elements right:
Before you start migrating to the cloud, the first thing to do is to define clear business goals and what you want to achieve. Many organisations rush into cloud transformations without aligning on the "why". This lack of strategic clarity causes problems down the road.
Take time upfront to decide exactly why you want to migrate systems and workloads to the cloud. Challenge business and technology leaders to make you ask tough questions to discover why the move is occurring. Common goals of cloud migration services and solutions include reducing IT costs, gaining more flexibility to scale computing needs up or down, speeding product or service development, supporting overall business growth, improving system reliability and performance, and strengthening security.
But don't just identify vague aspirations. Drill down to define tangible, measurable targets that clearly mark migration success, such as:
These objectives create accountability. They guide tradeoff decisions through the migration process and implementation phases. Concrete goals also help secure buy-in and funding from executives and business leaders.
The exercise of aligning on "why cloud and why now" sets the stage for an outcome-focused migration. It brings clarity of vision and commitment across the organisation - two fundamental ingredients for any technology transformation to propel business growth.
Cloud migrations are no exception and require detailed planning, like all successful IT projects. Crucial planning steps include:
Before recreating your on-premises landscape in the cloud, you need full visibility into your existing on-premises landscape. Inventories covering all aspects of your business prevent nasty surprises down the road.
Not all apps make good candidates for lift-and-shift migrations. Assess each application’s cloud suitability, including:
From here, you can categorise applications into phases – from “easy wins,” you can migrate quickly to “rehost” apps needing only minor tweaks for the cloud to “refactor” applications requiring more substantial re-architecting. Apps that never move to the cloud can be earmarked for retirement.
Catalog interdependencies between applications, data sources, and other ecosystem components. This mapping illuminates risks when moving systems and ensures proper sequencing of migration waves.
Decide which cloud platforms, infrastructure components, services, tools, and partnerships with reputable companies like Langate will comprise your future cloud environment. Map out how all the parts will interconnect to support your apps and workloads.
Through the planning process, continuously assess technical, operational, security, regulatory, and other risks. Mitigation steps to address these known issues should be defined proactively.
For migration success, the selection of the best cloud platforms and services for hosting your workloads is critical. A multi-cloud approach is most common as enterprises combine the best parts of various providers.
Typically, forcing applications and entire IT environments into a single cloud doesn't end well. However, the needs of diverse apps and workloads are too different. The whole spectrum of what you need will probably not be available from one cloud service.
For instance, engineering teams looking to do cutting-edge development will prioritise the richest functionality, latest services, and global footprint for infrastructure hyperscale clouds like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud offer. If you’re more of a traditional business application kind of person, and you need your ERP or CRM systems, maybe that fits down better on the enterprise-grade cloud on IBM Cloud or Oracle Cloud, which is just really rock solid at running legacy stuff.
Specialised cloud platforms designed with industry-specific apps and strict regulatory and data sovereignty constraints are better suited for healthcare, finance, government, and other verticals where industry-specific apps are at their best. Global companies need cloud services that allow them to locate data and compute capacity close to users across continents while maintaining unified visibility and governance.
To make the optimal cloud platform decisions, assess each of your key workloads across several dimensions:
This level of evaluation requires a deep understanding of your application architectures, infrastructure interdependencies, security policies, compliance obligations, and other nuances. However, investing the time upfront to match each workload with the ideal cloud platform tailored to its needs sets your migration and cloud experience as a whole up for success.
Users and apps won’t function in the cloud without reliable, high-performance network connectivity between your on-premises and cloud environments. Core components include:
Automating resource provisioning, app deployment, testing, monitoring, and management is critical for achieving cloud agility and efficiency. Core enablers include:
While the cloud promises cost savings, runaway expenses can quickly offset ROI. Tactics to better optimise cloud spending include:
Even with sound technology plans, people issues can still derail cloud migrations. To drive adoption and proficiency:
If done right, migrating legacy systems to the cloud can transform customer experiences, products, operations, and economics. But it requires careful planning and execution across seven key elements:
Check all these boxes with your cloud migration programme, and you’ll be well on your way to migration success and unlocking the cloud’s full value.