Migrating to the cloud is a key step for enterprises to stay agile, flexible and competitive – not only to keep pace with digital disruption, or as the technical foundation of an enterprise-wide digital transformation, but for running business-as-usual in the most efficient, effective manner.
According to Gartner, “Through 2022, growth in enterprise IT spending for cloud-based offerings will be faster than growth in traditional (non-cloud) IT offerings, making cloud computing one of the most disruptive forces in IT markets since the early days of the digital age.”
To find out more about the latest trends in cloud migration, we caught up with Troy McSimov, Vice President and General Manager with Technology Spa, a cloud professional and managed services company based in Dallas, Texas.
Troy has successfully guided both the build-out and migration of enterprise-wide private and public cloud solutions, overseen IT projects in mergers and acquisitions, built and maintained compliance programs in highly-regulated industries, and established successful teams to provide top-tier IT service delivery.
Thinkers360: What’s the first step to evaluating and planning a migration to the cloud?
TM: The first step, also the most important and often overlooked step, is understanding the why. Why are we planning a cloud migration? What are the driving factors that led to a cloud decision and why is that important to the planning process?
Is there a driving need to reduce capital expenditures and shift costs to operating expenses? Is there an urgency due to compliance, obsolescence, or expiring real estate lease? Is it in support of a consumer-focused digital transformation initiative? Is it part of a board-driven “Cloud First” approach or to be more responsive to the business?
The why will help with (1) aligning with business goals, (2) determining the scope and the migration approach, (3) setting expectations, and (4) determining metrics to be used to measure success.
Next, CIO’s should have a cloud readiness assessment conducted to gauge their current versus desired readiness to operate in a multi/hybrid cloud environment prior to any planned migration. Using the output from the assessment, they should next determine where they need to augment their internal teams with help from specialized partners to either fill these gaps or to assist with building these capabilities internally.
Thinkers360: As CIOs consider the cloud as a new IT architecture and operating model for their company’s digital business strategies, what are some of the new realities in terms of how they should plan financially? For example, we’ve heard that cloud is often more expensive now when compared to on-premise, is that true?
TM: That is a great question and you are correct, there are numerous stories of companies that have done a major lift-and-shift of their environment to the public cloud, only to immediately realize a much higher total cost of ownership, resulting in a slower adoption or altogether abandonment of cloud initiatives.
When planning a cloud migration, there are several factors that must be considered that include migration strategy, architecture, prioritization, and procurement; each having a significant financial impact to the total cost of ownership.
Choosing the simplest migration path like a major lift-and-shift over one that requires more transformation through re-architecture will likely reduce the one-time cost of migration, but is also likely to adversely increase the recurring costs for compute resources in the cloud. Companies that transform their technology landscape as they go to the cloud are more likely to have a lower cost of ownership, but that could come at a significant one-time cost and/or extend the time it takes to complete the migration.
Many cloud providers allow you to transition data to the cloud at no cost, but have an associated cost to get data out of the cloud. Moving workloads that have a heavy data dependency on remaining on-premise servers first can cause unexpected network costs from the cloud provider if direct connect solutions are not in place. Understanding these dependencies are crucial to minimizing such costs during application groupings and migration wave planning.
As you transition from on-premise, to private cloud, to public cloud (IaaS to PaaS to SaaS) you shift more of the responsibility away from internal support resources and to the cloud service providers. Typically, the cloud service providers have a lower cost of support for the underlying infrastructure than that of any one company due to the sheer scale in which they operate. It is required to transform internally as well to recognize these savings.
It will be necessary to use one or more cloud management tools, cloud native or 3rd party, to assist with gathering and analyzing usage data and aligning with business initiatives to further reduce costs through a reserved instance strategy.
Thinkers360: So once a decision has been made to move to the cloud, where should CIOs begin in planning for an enterprise-wide cloud migration? Should they think about their underlying cloud platform, target applications and workloads, or both?
TM: CIO’s should put in place one or more governing bodies to oversee the execution of the following:
- Building a well-architected cloud platform as a landing zone for application workloads
- Migration planning and execution
- Operational transformation
Thinkers360: We hear a lot about the different strategies for cloud migration such as the 5 R’s (rehost, refactor, revise, rebuild and replace). As CIOs consider their options, what are the pros and cons of the lift-and-shift (i.e. rehost) strategy when compared to some of the others?
TM: I prefer to use the following 6 R’s (retain, retire, rehost, replatform, refactor/rearchitect, and replace) as I believe each has specific values for use cases.
Pros | Cons | |
Retain | · Defer new monthly recurring charges until recent investments are fully realized
· Reduce the one-time migration related costs for workloads that may be retired or replaced in the next year or two |
· May not be able to respond quickly to new needs of the business if handcuffed to current infrastructure
· Extended dependency on facilities or internal and managed service providers for support of on-premise infrastructure |
Retire | · No more ongoing costs
· No additional one-time costs as compared to other migration strategies |
· None, why pay for what you are not using?
|
Rehost | · Fastest path for supported operating systems and applications
· Lower one-time migration costs · Greater flexibility for data localization and availability solutions |
· Likely higher recurring costs as compared to retaining on-premise without aggressive procurement strategy (spot instances, reserved instances, etc.)
· Does not take advantage of advanced cloud capabilities such as database and web app as a service or containerization and serverless compute options · In a shared responsibility model, only a small percentage of responsibility was transitioned to the cloud service provider |
Replatform | · Lower one-time migration cost as compared to complete re-architecture of the application
· Addresses a potential state of obsolescence within the on-premise environment
|
· Likely higher recurring costs as compared to retaining on-premise without aggressive procurement strategy (spot instances, reserved instances, etc.)
· In a shared responsibility model, only a small percentage of responsibility was transitioned to the cloud service provider |
Refactor / Rearchitect | · Lower cost of ownership
· Greater scale and resiliency · Allows for greater agility and responsiveness |
· Higher one-time migration cost
· More effort and time to complete migration · Potential vendor lock-in for proprietary PaaS solutions that are not portable to other cloud providers |
Replace | · Lower administration and cost of ownership
· More features and support · Best value |
· Limited customization
· May require business changes to adjust to service configuration · Vendor lock-in and limited types of access to data |
Thinkers360: Technology Spa partners with its enterprise customers on their cloud journey – across all stages of that journey – from strategy and governance through operations management. In your experience, what are some of the common pitfalls you’ve observed when migrating to the cloud and how does Technology Spa help avoid these?
TM: Lack of strategy and readiness, improper discovery techniques, flawed cost forecasting, and unreal expectations are typically the pitfalls that lead to poor or failed cloud adoption. Technology Spa has built tools, developed processes, and partnered with the best to help its customers avoid these pitfalls, improve adoption, and leverage the value of cloud.
We assist our customers throughout their cloud journey with capabilities and services such as strategy planning, complete discovery of the technology landscape, dependency mappings, operational readiness assessments, migration planning, migration execution, cloud broker and governance services as well as full cloud managed services.
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