Five Things to Avoid During Cloud Migration
Cloud adoption is rapidly gaining momentum with many businesses successfully transitioning complex enterprise applications to the Cloud. Umbrella Infocare has assisted more than 200 organizations move hundreds of enterprise applications to the Cloud during which we encountered myriad challenges, garnered experiences, gained insights and become wiser.
Migration is a complex process which requires designing for scale; continuous monitoring and compliance; knowledge of well architected framework which extensively leverages automation and build for failure; and optimizing strategies for cost and performance.
Based on our learnings we would like to share five pitfalls in the Cloud journey that will eliminate unnecessary hardships and smoothen your Cloud journey.
Faltering in Migration Decision Making
Embarking on the Cloud journey without thorough understanding of migration strategy will result in complexities, disruptions and inordinate delay. We must understand the existing environment and employ one of the six R strategies—retain, retire, rehost, repurchase, replatform, refactor/rearchitect—that best suit different sets of applications.
Sometimes it easier to re-architect in the Cloud and therefore it makes sense to simply “Lift and Shift” and optimize for cost and higher availability in phase two. It makes senses for organizations to evaluate which applications need new OS such as WSK3 to Win 2012 or Oracle 8 to 11 to decide which applications must migrate to the Cloud on priority.
Consider again the organization’s need to re-platform. For example a need to have managed database service like AWS RDS which eliminates administrative tasks including back up and patching or move to AWS Aurora from Oracle for a cost-effective, managed alternative.
Overcoming Network Connectivity
Ignore network connectivity assessment at your peril. Quality of connection between the datacentre and corporate office will determine the pace of migration and subsequent user experience. This will largely make or mar your Cloud migration initiative.
If the connection is poor, you will not be able to transport large amounts of data during migration. If you have a hybrid environment with business critical applications in the Cloud you will require integration for authentication, etc. Consider getting a dedicated connection through AWS Direct Connect; network optimization strategies; connectivity with robust SLAs or subscribe to Cloud distribution service provider for consumer facing applications.
Not Just an IT strategy
Cloud migration strategy must not be driven by IT alone as there are many business and operational issues associated with migration. Rather migration should be a comprehensive strategy driven by Cloud Center of Excellence comprising IT, business and operations which will identify right migration candidates, timelines and protocols. This will ensure all stakeholders are on board with similar goals and priorities. Cloud migration processes require lot of collaboration and support from different internal teams to ensure seamless continuity.
How to Avoid Cloud Stall
Avoid Cloud stall with a careful, calibrated approach. Selecting the first set of applications with least dependencies is important to gain confidence and maintain momentum. Organizations must define adoption framework which assess business impact of different approaches; map availability of internal skills to assist migration; think out governance issues; understand Cloud architectures and changes required to make applications Cloud ready; and adopt changes in operational and monitoring aligned to needs of Cloud environments.
All Cloud are Not Same
Different Cloud platforms offer different services and functionality. Customers must do due diligence while selecting appropriate Cloud platform after careful evaluation of breadth and depth of offering; evaluating range of customer base; variety of workload and complexity in deployment. Customers must also carefully consider partner ecosystem who bring extensive experience, insights, learnings and best practices which does compare with knowledge and experience of in-house IT team.
While evaluating partner it is important to assess partner’s experience, number of certified architects, technical depth including scale and complexity of deployment partner has implemented.
If you are embarking on Cloud migration journey or want to know more about different migration strategies, reach out to us.
