Six Principles For Cloud Migration

As Cloud adoption continues to growth , there are an increasing number of companies that are considering migrating their applications to the Cloud. If you are considering moving to the Cloud or you have already taken the decision to migrate your applications, consider the following six principles:

Analyse Your Applications Before The Migration

Analyzing your current on premises applications is a must, especially how they are running and performing. If you want to understand how your applications will run on the Cloud, a thorough analysis can help you establish expectations, before and after the migration.

My recommendation is to get some metrics from your existing monitoring systems to establish your current optimal baseline. This will be helpful for you and your migrating partner to understand the current end to end response time when running your applications on premises. Such information can be useful to compare the end to end performance of your application once it is running on the Cloud. If you feel you have issues with performance in the Cloud, you need to show comparable performance data of before and after your migration, so that your Cloud partner can identify and address potential issues.

Other basic metrics such as usage and average load on your systems will help in predicting and planning for your Cloud move; consider trimming down your current systems. Consolidation is your best ally , get rid of applications and services that cause duplication. Also, ensure that applications with low usage get deprecated or merge to other systems currently running with high loads.

My recommendation is to split your apps into compliance sensitive apps and non compliance sensitive apps. The Cloud is a safe place to run compliance-sensitive workloads, however, don't make your most data sensitive apps the place to start your migration.

Utilize your application metrics to understand which apps have elastic loads and plan on how those apps will behave on the Cloud. Perhaps those apps are the perfect candidates for a migration to SaaS providers that can take on your elastic load needs.

SaaS providers are often the smart choice for enterprise applications that require fast scaling and performance.

It is important to know what apps should migrate to the Cloud first and to understand how each app will benefit from the move to the Cloud. Don't forget it is only when you fully understand the current state of your apps, that you can really craft an efficient strategy for their migration.

Extensive Business Analysis

Before starting your migration, have a clear business strategy. Consider the pros and cons of moving your apps to the Cloud.

Building your own business strategy is most effective; while reference sites or existing business cases from other companies are very helpful, you should do a thorough analysis in order to understand your own business needs. Also consider how the move to the Cloud is going to impact your current productivity and workload.

While the Cloud can benefit you on several fronts, in the long term, there is some short term pain to consider and budget for.

Ensure You Understand The Costs Involved

There are often overlooked related costs to migrations, ensure you put together a cost breakdown and give it enough room or tolerance for the unforeseen events that may arise during the migration phase. Once you are in the Cloud, don't overlook the cost associated with storage and scaling. Savings are one of the reasons why companies want to move to the Cloud, however optimizing the Cloud costs requires your full attention and is the first priority to ensure success when running in the Cloud.

Get Yourself And Your Team Trained For The ‘brave new world’ In The Cloud

Appropriate training goes a long way when moving to the Cloud; the Cloud is a ‘brave new world’ full of opportunities, however it can be an overwhelming concept for teams and entire organizations. To make sure you understand your provider's and your own obligations  when running your applications in the Cloud, be sure you have a clear training plan in order to understand the extent of new responsibilities . This means having a clear definition of the thin line between provider and client commitment.

My previous article is a good place to start this journey, as it discusses one of the most important questions when moving to the Cloud, "Who is responsible for the Cloud?".

Ensure You Do More Than Lift And Shift

If you want to succeed during and after your migration to the Cloud, you need to look beyond your on-premises working model and understand that you need to consciously change your thinking and your processes to operating in the Cloud environment. Blindly replicating old processes in the Cloud isn't always a good option, as a broken process is not going to be fixed by simply moving it to a new location. The migration to the Cloud is the  perfect opportunity to evaluate current processes and make necessary changes to improve operations. When migrating to the Cloud, you want to move away from just lift and shift and instead move towards an optimized, process driven strategy around the new Cloud paradigm.

The Cloud is full of benefits but it requires proper change management; always consider your end goal, listen to your employees and your clients, and don't lose sight of the final objective during the migration.

Encourage the organisation to embrace cultural change and ensure all your departments have established goals before and after the migration. Doing this groundwork will ensure you build processes around the Cloud capabilities.

When it comes to migration, it is important to remember that your vendor is a strategic partner; open the channels of communication and let them bring their domain expertise regarding transitions. You bring your unique business understanding to the table and ensure the vendor is  clear about your end goal. Even if they are doing most of the heavy lifting during the migration, your organization can't let itself out of the process. Picture the migration as a large ship and your company is in charge of steering it in the right direction.

Where possible, create a specific project team, or teams to tackle the technical and non technical complexities of your migrations, also have your ‘best guys' ready to assist.

Before your migration, fix what is broken; don't wait until you are running on the Cloud to tackle issues that can be resolved beforehand.

Most importantly, be honest; being transparent and open with your migration partner is very important. Always acting on the mutual principle of trust will help both parties overcoming critical moments during and after the migration to the Cloud.

Enjoy And Focus On Your Business

Finally, if done well with the right partner, your migration to the Cloud can bring immediate benefits. It can increase your customer's satisfaction, drive productivity up, drive down costs to the core business and, most importantly, it will allow you to focus on your business growth and future vision.