By: Hasan Ali Doulatganjwala and Manojeet Chatterjee

Enterprises are migrating to the cloud, especially in the post Covid world. Let’s learn the top 10 ways to achieve cloud migration success from our cloud experts.

We live in a time when organizations, increasingly reliant on cloud services, are migrating computes to the cloud. According to researchers, more than 70% of businesses have now moved at least some workloads to public clouds. The COVID-19 pandemic was a major driver of this transformation. Major corporations such as Netflix, Spotify, and Pinterest have successfully migrated their complex and globally distributed processing to the cloud, serving as a model for others to emulate.

However, not every migration has been a success story. For some enterprises, the cloud failed because it did not provide the expected returns on investment. Although the cloud is undoubtedly the future, certain factors need to be considered to set more realistic post-migration expectations. It is essential to ensure that the cloud investment meets the aspirations and vision of the organization. Let us examine critical areas of oversights or neglect that cause failure in the cloud migration process.

Factors for Successful Cloud Migration

• Planning for optimum availability. While critical applications and computes demand high availability to ensure business continuity, many do not benefit from them proportionately. We need to ensure that high availability computer-dependent workloads are available as well. Also, there may be a need to provide on-premises disaster recovery as a fail-safe. The availability is directly proportional to redundancies that demand resources on standby. Architects are advised to take a more conservative approach by eliminating happy paths and planning for the complete and sudden unavailability of cloud provider services. Hybrid, multi-region deployment, and multi-provider models could be factored in. This aspect is a critical cost driver, and overlooking it can lead to poor investment returns.
• Expansion of security architecture. Legacy applications inevitably bring the burden of specific identification and authorization algorithms. Migrating applications need to abide by a shared security model offered by cloud platform providers. This, in turn, puts greater responsibility on companies implementing a migration to deploy enterprise-grade overarching security architecture. In addition, organizations need to consider the encryption and privacy requirements through the lens of enterprise offerings empowered by modern cloud capabilities. A sound understanding of security needs may warrant streamlining incoherent approaches to a cloud-friendly and robust architecture. This assessment can cause operational disruptions when delayed or ignored due to the mayhem caused by entanglements of unaligned security architectures.
• Forecasting of realistic bills. High, unexpected operational bills is the most common tripping point for organizations that start migrating to the cloud. The ease of deploying SAAS (Software as A Service) offerings beyond essential platform services make cost forecasting even more complex due to complex costing models. In addition, many companies need to maintain hybrid architecture such as VPN (Virtual Private Network), Direct Connect, etc. Poorly designed cloud architecture can result in soaring operational charges. Further, the operations teams need to train or acquire cloud skills in addition to mandatory product skills. Organizations need to clearly understand the workforce skillset demands business continuity.
• Provisioning performance. The compute diversity introduced by migration is compounded by various data delivery mechanics. This makes it challenging to ensure service-level agreements economically. With multiple platforms and architecture entanglement, architects find it difficult to lift and shift monolithic applications. Blanket provisioning of high compute availability cannot guarantee desired output due to the low processing capacity of dependent processes. Organizations must partner with service providers experienced in optimum yet economical data delivery architecture. A successful post-cloud migration strategy hinges on understanding the provisioning needs to ensure promised performance for expected and maximum loads.
• Containing complexity. An explosion of service offerings lures architects to advance legacy migrating applications to the latest and most outstanding offerings. In most cases, these advancements prove beneficial; however, when major processing systems stay home, these initiatives could complicate operations by expanding the technical landscape. The interweaving of diverse technologies to render computing for critical business needlessly complicates sustainability. Architects are advised to perform a decision analysis for new services introduced during migration. These should be weighed in with the management to ensure all pros and cons are well understood, and decisions are aligned with the corporate’s mission to migrate to the cloud.
• Planning growth on the Cloud wisely. During the initial planning, it might seem beneficial to move all the business functions to the cloud in one go. External factors such as the continuity of cloud professionals, the organization’s planning cycles, etc., drive such decisions. And this sometimes leads to very aggressive organizational change management and user adoption targets. A cloud migration plan that brings in an “all cloud” mindset needs to understand the underlying mechanics of manpower. The capacity and ability assessment of the staff will help understand their readiness to adopt the cloud. The following approach can help establish a balanced migration strategy:

• • Every application planned for migration must present a strong rationale for migrating to the cloud
  • The applications without a strong use case can migrate in later waves.
  • The applications need to be grouped according to dependencies and benefits achieved by migrating to the cloud.
  • Based on goals and risk appetite, the right proportions of applications need to be selected.
• Bulletproofing with testing. Every customer’s journey to the cloud is unique. And so are their challenges and struggles. While we can learn from other’s mistakes, it cannot guarantee a safe ride. Also, the delay in discovering potential issues leads to expensive probes. The only way to ensure safety is through an effective testing strategy. Effective testing plans span all the stages of migration. A combined effort by business and IT teams yields the best results. The strong safety net of testing will help avoid major disasters. The migration planning should accommodate a quality testing plan. It also provides high-level confidence through the cloud journey.
• Appropriately managing user adoption. Any cloud migration is also a business transformation project. The application changes needed for migration have an impact on business operations. And business teams need to embrace such adjustments for a successful migration. For a successful migration, the team should plan realistic organizational change management. The business teams need to understand the impact on their operations with the help of their IT partners. And collaboratively ensure no disruptions by providing smooth adoption.
• Minimize disruption during migration. In today’s world, any host cloud platforms provide offerings at par with its competitors. These capabilities empower the migrating teams to deploy automation. This automation ensures velocity with accuracy. These capabilities also offer full-stack observability. And such capabilities will provide a proactive approach to potential failure points. The velocity to the root cause also increases exponentially with such tools. In the event of not planning intelligent and autonomous migration, the impact of not meeting targets can be significant. This is significantly amplified when dependent components falter on the plan. Significant delays impact business operations and morale. If not contained, in some critical scenarios, reversals are done that create a domino effect triggering whole migration rollbacks.
• Strategic collaborations with trusted partner selection. Organizations need to understand that a blend of competencies will make the best recipe for success. The following factors will help in determining the partners who will assist in the cloud journey:

• • Partners who are familiar with the current ecosystems. These are the vendors who provide operational support and have a thorough understanding of the existing systems. They are the most aware of the gaps and deficiencies.
  • Partners that have experience with cloud migrations. These are the vendors who understand cloud offerings and have demonstrated competencies on a comparable scale and technological landscape. As business processes change, these partners typically offer consulting services as well.

Organizations need to carefully evaluate the proportions with clear roles and responsibilities defined. Teams benefit from including orientation and onboarding new cloud vendors in migration plans.

Finally, architects must ask the right questions for successful cloud migration in their organizations. Foresight and planning are required. Recognizing the organization’s needs, taking into account attributes such as performance, security, data privacy, competent workforce, billing, and sustainability, and realistically aligning these to cloud capabilities will significantly increase returns on investment.

References:

• https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/6-ways-cloud-migration-costs-go-off-the-rails
• https://increment.com/cloud/case-studies-in-cloud-migration/
• https://searchcio.techtarget.com/feature/Cloud-migration-failures-and-how-to-prevent-them