By: Sachin Kamath, Principal Director – Data Engineering, LTIMindtree

While cloud has emerged as the de facto destination in nearly every digital transformation journey, walking the talk of cloud RoI remains a challenge for most. Here are the key steps to make a seamless transition.

In brief

• Cloud migration is a significant undertaking, and your business sponsors will want to know what they are signing up for. Back your business case with data and evidence.
• Invest time in understanding if you really need ops control in your cloud operating model. Scout for the most favorable contract terms from different cloud providers.
• You may be constrained by your budget when devising a migration strategy. Leverage saved costs and investments recovered by retiring infrastructure to advance cloud maturity.
• Take an incremental approach to de-risk your migration. Leverage standardization for strong QA and maintain an issue log to keep track of outcomes.

Introduction

While the scalability, cost savings, and resilience offered by the cloud have compelled businesses to mass-migrate from their on-prem environments, most of these benefits tend to slip from their hands without a proven strategy. However, cloud is a significant aspect of business process transformation – which is why migrating to the cloud is an inevitable step for nearly every business today.

Today, cloud costs are under the control of only 22% I&O leaders, and nearly 70% of cloud migrations fail. While having the entire organization on board is an important first step, it is equally crucial to have a well-defined approach to assessing a vendor and executing your migration.

To this end, here are the key steps to win support from business stakeholders, conducting thorough vendor assessments, roadmapping your move to the cloud, and making it happen.

Building a business case for cloud migration

Migrating your workloads and assets to the cloud is a significant undertaking. It entails a shift in the relationship between business and technology, and (probably) retiring your existing infrastructure. That’s why, apart from a leap of faith, cloud migration also requires trust and buy-in from all stakeholders – and most importantly, your business sponsors.

What matters the most to business sponsors?

1. Return on Investment:they will want to know whether the move to cloud will help them save on their IT budgets. Cloud providers claim up to 30% infrastructure savings, but there are other sources of RoI too – like reduced downtimes and improved security.
2. Hidden costs:beyond the costs of cloud are there any other overheads that they should expect to pay for after making the move? Hidden costs may detract from the RoI, and unexpected bills will not be welcome.
3. Strategic benefits:this is a part of the why behind the migration. Improved agility and time-to-market, for example, could lend your service or product a strategic edge in the market. Cloud can also help you modernize processes in your business process transformation efforts.
4. Vendor lock-in:right now, the business owns the infrastructure that drives it. However, when you move to the cloud, your vendor owns that infrastructure. How will you address the prospects of vendor lock-in?

How to build a data-driven business case for cloud migration?

To address these concerns, back your case for cloud migration with data and evidence. Here are three tips:

1. Use cloud cost projection models:CSPs and 3rd parties offer numerous tools that help you calculate the cost of running an application in their environment. These tools can discover your assets, and offer cost projections, which can be used to arrive at a reasonably precise estimate.
2. Cloud management tooling costs:different service models will bring different maintenance overheads. For example, you may need a third-party service for cloud security, cost management, or observability. Account for these overheads in your plan.
3. Change management and skills gap:running in the cloud requires a new set of skills and changes in established procedures. Do you have a plan to handle it? How long will the transition take, and will there be disruptions to the business?

Assessing vendors and selecting the right service model

Once you secure support for your cloud migration plan at the board level, it is time to flesh out your migration strategy. A key aspect of this is picking a service model that offers the highest RoI on your budget, and finding a provider that offers the best fit for your workloads/applications.

Which service model to opt for?

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service:in IaaS, the provider offers SLAs on compute resources and hardware security, whereas everything else is managed by your teams. This model comes with the highest management overheads, but offers the highest degree of control and customizability in return. You should opt for it only when you need that control (say, for compliance reasons) or customizability.
• Software-as-a-Service:in SaaS, the provider will offer SLAs on a particular service. It typically comes with the least management overheads, but control and customizability will be limited. Opt for it when you want to deliver a capability directly to your end-users (say, sales, or logistics teams) and eliminate almost all maintenance responsibilities.
• Platform-as-a-Service:this is a middle path between IaaS and SaaS. In PaaS, you will be able to retain some control over the deployment. It may enable you to choose your own data architecture, OS, or runtime while taking care of the rest. It will make sense for those who want to operate with a minimal Ops team.

A checklist for picking the right cloud service provider

Across each service model, you will have offerings from multiple providers to support your use case. The following criteria must be a part of your assessment process.

1. Best-fit services and technologies:if you are planning a lift-and-shift migration, the cloud provider’s environment must align well with your existing technologies. Moreover, their service roadmap must complement your application portfolio.
2. Performance and reliability:does the provider have a history of unexpected outages? How do they measure up against their competitors on price-performance of core capabilities?
3. Certifications and compliance:if your own applications are subject to regulations like the GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS, look for offerings from providers that are compliant with these regulations. Industry certifications also demonstrate a commitment to adhere to leading practices.
4. Billing and terms of contract:scout for providers who are willing to offer the most favorable pricing and contract terms. In some scenarios, you may be able to bag discounts for multiple years of committed use.
5. Security capabilities and trust:Cloud security is difficult, which is why secure-by-design and secure-by-default capabilities can make or break a deal. Don’t forget to evaluate built-in monitoring, security, and access controls – and how intuitive they feel to your users.

Building a migration plan

Orchestrating a cloud migration successfully means that every detail must be planned well in advance. Here are some key aspects that must be covered.

Discovering your workloads

Some cloud providers will offer tools for automated workload discovery. These can be used to inventory your workloads. Each workload will be subjected to a different migration pathway depending on what it does, and your migration budget.

Selecting the right strategy for your workloads

• Rehost:also called lift and shift, this strategy is apt for non-differentiating workloads where you can achieve assured savings. Disaster Recovery (DR) and failovers are prime candidates for rehosting.
• <strongreplatform:< strong=”” style=”box-sizing: border-box;”>In this approach, your workload’s core architecture will not be altered, but it may be moved from a legacy platform to a modern, cloud-based platform. For example, a legacy Oracle deployment may be moved to a similar, cloud-native offering.</strongreplatform:<>
• <strongrefactor:< strong=”” style=”box-sizing: border-box;”>This is also called rearchitecting. It is leveraged for differentiating applications, where a modular architecture (think microservices or containers) offers a strategic advantage. It takes significantly longer and costs more to rearchitect an application than rehosting or replatforming it.</strongrefactor:<>

More considerations for selecting a migration strategy

Each of the above approaches will enable you to pay off the technical debt to varying degrees. However, some organizations also begin with rehosting to get comfortable in the cloud and undertake replatforming or rearchitecting efforts later on.

Depending on your budget, you may be constrained by your options. Moreover, the savings from the cloud migration and funds recovered by retiring your data centers can be siphoned to advance your cloud maturity or funding other streams of your digital transformation platform.

Determining a cutover strategy

Some of your mission-critical workloads will not be able to tolerate even a second of downtime. For others, your business users may be willing to tolerate some scheduled downtime. Depending on these factors, a cutover strategy must be devised before executing the migration.

There are multiple approaches to ensure a zero-downtime cutover. Some of these include bidirectional synchronization of on-prem and cloud DBs, or setting up a unidirectional synchronization for a read replica in the cloud.

Executing your migration plan

Typically, cloud migrations are executed in waves or phases. Workloads and databases with minimal external dependencies should be prioritized. Taking an incremental approach helps you de-risk your migration.

Building standard test and validation procedures

Validation tests, whether to ensure functional integrity, performance, or UA, must be standardized, and they should be a part of a well-documented test plan. Build and disseminate test-script templates to avoid duplication of effort, and maintain an issue log to keep track of the outcomes.

Synchronizing source and target datasets

To synchronize your source and cloud datasets, robust failure-handling mechanisms must be implemented to replicate with integrity. You may opt for a real-time or a near real-time synchronization strategy depending on whether you want to maintain a strong consistency, or achieve that consistency eventually before you retire your legacy system.

Benefits of cloud migration

• Implement KPI tracking for your migrated workloads. This will help you communicate the benefits realized through the migration to your business sponsors.
• Leverage the agility of cloud to build and ship your applications faster, more frequently, and with improved performance.
• Scale your infrastructure based on your needs, and pay only for what you use. Implement continuous optimization processes to tame cloud costs.

Conclusion

Being a crucial component of digital transformation platforms, getting cloud migration right the first time is the key to making your initiative successful. If your in-house teams lack the requisite expertise in cloud, joining hands with a technology leader can lend you a strategic edge in your digital transformation journey.

Successful cloud migration requires a concerted effort from multiple stakeholders. However, more importantly, success depends on a mindset shift. As cloud providers roll out new services every day, the scope of improvement and innovation is endless.