More and more companies are moving their operations to the Cloud. By 2025, 85% of enterprises will have a cloud-first principle, according to Gartner. The benefits of migrating to the Cloud are compelling: cost savings, flexibility, mobility, insights, greater collaboration, immediate access to the latest software, improved disaster recovery, to name but a few.
However, too many businesses embark on the journey from legacy to Cloud and variously make costly mistakes, have to start the process again and don’t realise all the benefits the intended. And some businesses don’t make adequate provisions for supporting their traditional environment while they are on the journey, which has significant consequences for their day to day business.
Getting the journey right means focusing on business outcomes, defining the cloud objectives, and preparing and charting the course of your journey. These are AWS’ eight critical steps for successful migration:
Cultivate alignment across senior management
Before cloud migration begins, you must ensure buy-in across all key stakeholders. Start by identifying concrete goals that everyone can support, then create timetables and benchmarks for achieving those goals, along with mechanisms to measure progress and communicate to the larger team.
Identify top-down goals
You need to identify aggressive, top-down quantifiable goals that force your organisation to move faster than it would organically.
Establish leaders & train teams
Staff your teams with a single accountable lead. Articulate exactly how data centre roles will change, over what timescale. And upskill your team as fast as you can.
Get early wins to prove business case
Begin by identifying one or more applications that can move quickly and easily to the Cloud and will deliver highly visible benefits. Pearl and AWS has tools to help you review all your applications and classify them into: 1) easy to move 2) medium or hard to move, and 3) save for last.
Capitalise on modernisation benefits
This process can be broken into three phases: 1) assess 2) mobilise and 3) migrate and modernise. The first phase involves assessing your organisation’s current readiness for operating in the Cloud. The second is focused on mobilising your organisation with a detailed migration plan and a refined business case. The third is migrating and modernising your applications while optimising operations along the way.
Choose the appropriate migration pattern
Common migration patterns usually follow one of seven basic patterns: relocate, rehost, re-platform, repurchase, refactor, retain or retire. Pearl can take you through these, so you choose the option that is right for you.
Sustain & accelerate momentum
AWS has identified four key barriers or ‘anti-patterns’ to rapid and effective Cloud migration that you need to focus on: 1) continual renewal of executive buy-in. 2) slow cycle plan with big projects 3) non-convergent pursuits 4) serialised dependant execution.
Build your Cloud enablement engine
In the Cloud-first environment, a DevOps operating model becomes the norm. However, most enterprises benefit from having a central team that handles the heavy lifting of configuring and integrating Cloud platform services on the developers’ behalf.