How to successfully migrate to the cloud
A Cloud migration is a complex process that entails moving a business’s operational applications to the cloud. A typical migration has many moving parts which must be taken into consideration for the migration to be completed successfully without disruptions to business operations or increases in security risk.
Prior to the migration, the cloud providers, or managed service providers, run a budgetary assessment on their IT Infrastructure which paints a picture of what kinds of servers and applications are running in the customer’s environment. These assessments usually take one to two months to run and are typically performed with the assistance of partner discovery tools and manual spreadsheet efforts.
Businesses face a myriad of challenges during a cloud migration. In most IT ecosystems, there are many applications that have various dependencies, and those dependencies might have other dependencies, further complicating the planning process. If you were to migrate applications while only addressing some of the dependencies while leaving out others, this would result in a very unpleasant situation. The applications, or business services as they are called in the cloud, would either not work properly, or not at all.
After the initial budgetary assessment, businesses often run a second assessment which takes a closer look at their IT environment, grouping together applications into business services and mapping out the dependencies. However, with a typical assessment, this process is manual, time-consuming, and error-prone.
To overcome these challenges CloudSphere has a unique solution that combines the budgetary and in-depth assessment into one continuous solution. This continuous automation provides organizations complete visibility into all their cyber assets and dependencies.
To simplify what can be a complex process, CloudSphere has launched a new series of consoles that provide comprehensive insights that are derived from their unique cyber asset management platform. This puts the needed information within easy reach and summarizes data into digestible overviews to provide the actionable insights an organization needs for successful migrations and ongoing management of their hybrid IT estate.
CloudSphere lists a best practice of six approaches to cloud migration, which is commonly called the 6 R’s (rehost, replatform, re-architect, repurchase, retain, and retire), and is built upon the 5 R’s that Gartner outlined in 2010. The new consoles automatically provide 6R guidance for each discovered business service on how to best move forward.
When opening the interactive migration console, you are greeted by several useful components. Here are some of the components that I found to be very helpful:
· Service Migration Complexity & Risk: This element helps users perform assessments and manage and track the progress of a migration as it takes place. It displays the migration status on a graph, which is broken down into complexity (on the X-axis) and risk (on the Y-axis). The migration is broken down into multiple waves (i.e. Wave1, Wave 2, Wave3) which helps you better plan the migration by placing them into bite-sized chunks, as opposed to getting stuck with paralysis by analysis. The end-user is provided with an analysis that enables them to understand which business services are eligible to move to the cloud, and which ones might need some additional fine-tuning before it is considered cloud-ready.
· Cost by Service Analysis: One of the most terrifying aspects of moving to the cloud, for the uninitiated, is the post-migration sticker shock. Imagine the reaction of the CIO when he receives an invoice, from the company’s new cloud service provider, for several dozen lab servers that their software development team left running 24x7 for an entire month! That can give even the toughest IT manager panic attacks! Fortunately, CloudSphere gives you a great way to estimate your monthly costs upfront and plan your migration accordingly. This tool allows you to select a cloud provider (for example, AWS or Azure) and will display the cost comparison of services by month, 1 year, and 3 years. It will also show you the cost difference between usage-based cost and reserved instances so that you know which option is better for your software development team upfront, and there will be no surprises. This is especially useful in a multi-cloud environment where the cost for the same service can vary significantly from provider to provider. With the detailed information at your fingertips, you are empowered to choose the best cloud service from the provider whose costs meet YOUR needs.
· Service Completeness: This is a summary that lets you know what percentage of the services were scanned as part of the assessment. As discussed above, one of the risk factors when it comes to cloud migration is not knowing which dependency goes with which service. If something wasn’t scanned, then it is unknown, and anything unknown increases your risk level. Knowing where you’re at as part of the assessment lets you make informed decisions as to the next step you need to take.
In conclusion, while cloud migrations are complex by nature, there are ways to reduce the risks and pitfalls associated with the process. The new insight consoles by CloudSphere can help you simplify the migration and significantly reduce risk by automating the mapping out business services and their dependencies, as well as enabling you to perform a cost analysis against a database of multiple cloud service providers. With information like this at your fingertips, you are empowered to confidently march forward toward the next step of your company’s digital transformation.
To learn more, visit CloudSphere’s website.
About the Author
Avrohom Gottheil is the founder of #AskTheCEO Media, where he helps global brands get heard over the noise on social media, by presenting their corporate message using language people understand.
Avrohom presents his clients as Thought Leaders, which challenges his audience to reimagine their own mission and vision, delivering actionable insights, and leaving them passionate, motivated, and with the necessary tools to take immediate action.
Avrohom comes from a 20+ year career in IT and Telecom, where he helped businesses around the world install and maintain their communication systems and contact centers. He is a Top-ranked global expert in IoT, AI, Cloud, and Cybersecurity, followed worldwide on Twitter, and a frequent speaker on leveraging technology to accelerate revenue growth.
Listen to him share the latest technology trends, tools, and best practices for IoT, AI, Cloud, Cybersecurity, and emerging technologies on the #AskTheCEO podcast — voted as the #1 Channel Friendly Podcast in 2019 by Forrester, and #2 Podcast from Thinkers360 Thought Leaders in 2020.
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