Failing to plan is planning to fail when moving to the cloud

[MorneJonker]

The cloud. You can’t live in a digital world and not have had to deal with it. The pressure is on from all sides to take services into the cloud, and the purported benefits of cloud implementation are significant. But the problem is that many businesses simply failed to plan their migrations effectively.

Taking a ‘big bang’ approach and just lifting and shifting an entire IT infrastructure into the cloud almost never yields the desired results. In fact, we’ve seen many businesses who took this approach and subsequently moved back to an on-premise arrangement, also known as ‘boomeranged’.

Why? Without a proper plan in place, and a trusted partner to assist in the journey, the cloud ends up being more cumbersome and more costly than a traditional solution. You get all of the problems and none of the benefits – completely the opposite of the desired effect.

HPE Cloud Services can help you find the right mix of hybrid cloud that can turn your IT organisation into a valuable change agent for innovation and growth. HPE’s cloud consulting partners can assess your current applications, find the right mix of clouds for your workloads, identify gaps in technology and skills, and create a migration plan.

It’s more complex than you think

Some systems, like email, can easily be migrated into the cloud. For example, Microsoft Exchange offers a practically seamless process for this, and a lot of businesses are already using it. But not everything is such a simple matter.

Many systems need to be refactored, rehosted and repurposed before they can be effectively migrated. For a lot of businesses, there are also legacy applications that are critical and cannot be moved into the cloud. It would require the entire system to be rewritten and processes to be redeveloped - doing so wouldn’t be cost effective. The consequences of getting any element of this wrong could be catastrophic.

Cloud should save costs, not increase them

Picking up the entire infrastructure and dumping it into the cloud creates a host of problems that can cause huge business disruption, not to mention the fact that this approach can increase costs exponentially.

One of the reasons for this is intrinsic in the way we’ve designed on premises infrastructure – we’ve oversized it to cater for future growth. The cloud uses a different model of consumption and oversizing our cloud capacity just means we’re paying for resources we don’t need. There’s also the fact that cloud isn’t actually a true consumption-based model. You typically need to make a minimum commitment, so when signing an agreement with a hyperscale cloud provider, businesses often agree to move ‘X’ amount of compute and storage into the cloud within an agreed upon time frame. If they don’t do this, they still have to pay for all of the capacity they agreed to take, as well as penalties for not delivering on their end of the bargain.

There’s also the hidden cost of egress charges, which are levied when you want to move data out of the cloud or between clouds, even within the same provider. These costs rack up and ultimately what was supposed to be a cost-saving exercise ends up being hugely expensive.

Migration is a journey, not a destination

How do you decide where the quick wins lie, what can be moved immediately and what needs to be changed or adapted before it can be moved? How do you identify solutions you just can’t move because the cost would negate any potential benefits? The truth is that moving into the cloud is an ongoing process. That’s the definition of a migration – the controlled process of moving from one point to another.

Once you’ve migrated the quick wins, then you start to examine the next round of applications and systems that can be moved in addition to identifying how they should be moved and what the business impact will be. Cloud migrations aren’t an IT problem, they’re a strategic business decision that needs to be carefully considered.

It’s also important to remember that the cloud isn’t all or nothing. There are hardware vendors that can give you the cloud experience without actually moving to a hyperscale cloud, so you can leverage on premise infrastructure in a pay per use model with the management and flexibility benefits of the cloud. You also get the added benefit of having complete control over access and security.

Planning is critical to success

Failing to plan means you are planning to fail. So, if you want to succeed in your cloud migration, you need to develop a roadmap to outline the stages of the journey, with the understanding that we will never live in a completely cloud-based world.

The right combination of cloud and on premises, supported by a trusted advisor and partner, is the key to leveraging the benefits of a hybrid IT environment.