The Cloud Journey, Part 2 – Migrate

Getting started with cloud often causes challenges and risks. SoftwareONE can help you adjust and plan your cloud strategy. In this series of posts we’ll cover the different aspects of a strategic approach to cloud:

1. Evaluate
2. Migrate
3. Manage 
4. Secure
5. Innovate

In this second part – Migrate – we will cover common challenges and concerns faced by organizations when planning their migration to the cloud.

The concept of migration is not completely new to the industry. Migrations have been done for years , though the main migration type was lift & shift. So while this is not a new concept, the step of actually moving to the cloud creates certain new challenges you need to take into consideration. There are a few steps to take to get from planning your move to the public cloud to actually moving your workload there. Let’s take a look at this migration planning journey:

When customers are asked what they actually want to move to the cloud, the most common answer is “everything.” However, the key to creating a proper migration plan is to understand your estate, and the reasons WHY you want to migrate. By starting with an assessment of your current environment, you can determine which services you are going to migrate and how it can best be done. We recommend considering the 5 R’s (refactor, rehost, rearchitect, retain, retire) to measure each service and define your migration plan in detail.

When you don’t know what systems are in use or where your corporate data is held, your entire business is at risk and cloud spend can easily increase. Governance helps to reduce your risk and puts proper controls in place to ensure compliance. A Cloud Governance Lifecycle describes the end-to-end requirements of Cloud Governance, from planning, architecture and deployment to bursting, switching Cloud providers, and offboarding from a Cloud. We can help you navigate through the complex process of establishing a Cloud Governance Framework Document that outlines standard procedures to be followed when migrating any workload to the cloud while also ensuring (data) security and compliance:

• Cost Management
• Security Baseline
• Resource Consistency
• Identity Baseline
• Deployment Acceleration

Once you’ve done your “As-Is” Assessment and you know what you want to move to the cloud, you know your security requirements and you have put the proper policies and procedures in place, it’s time to think about where you want to put your workload. We can help you better understand the different ways you can consume cloud – be it Pay-As-You-Go, directly purchasing from a Cloud vendor or working with a trusted cloud advisor such as SoftwareONE.

However, the most important decision to be made will definitely be the migration approach:

• Transition – the typical Lift & Shift approach when timelines are tight and moving applications or workloads to the cloud requires no changes.
• Transformation – based on an intense rearchitecting and re-factoring process, when modernization of workload is needed and a longer lead time can be considered.

Are you wondering what kind of migration approach will work best for you? We have a collection of best-practices and customer use cases ready to guide you through each approach and understand the risks and benefits of each.

Although cloud migration has been done for years, it still presents its fair share of challenges. A detailed cloud migration plan can help organizations to better understand the priorities of their cloud strategy and move to the cloud with confidence. Since not all workloads benefit from using the same migration approach, it is important to evaluate the most efficient ways to prioritize and migrate applications and workloads before going live.

As your trusted cloud advisor, SoftwareONE can help you prepare a migration plan that works best for your business needs with tailored:

• Envision & Assessment workshops 
• Governance workshops
• Design & Deploy of Best Practices Landing Zones
• Migration with access to partner funding
• Azure and AWS Consumption methods