An enterprise can perform many types of cloud migrations. 

Transferring data and applications from an on-premises data center to the cloud is one common model, but cloud migration can also involve moving data and applications between cloud platforms or providers. This second scenario is known as cloud-to-cloud migration. 

Reverse cloud migration, also known as cloud repatriation, is another type of migration. This involves the transfer of data or applications from one cloud platform to another.

But cloud migration may not be right for organization. 

Cloud environments can be scalable, reliable, and highly available. However, these are not the only factors that will drive your decision.

Cloud Migration for Businesses

Cloud computing brings a new level of life and innovation to your company’s business practice and application architecture. 

It’s going to be necessary to have a real conversation with your executives and technical leads about the cost of a cloud migration since it’s not as simple as flipping a switch. It’s more like any lasting change, with milestones. 

This cloud presents a whole new way to work, new ways to deploy, tools and services that can help you automate and self-heal your infrastructure. It can be overwhelming to see the different ways infrastructure functions within a cloud environment. It’s important to be familiar with how it works, its risks and benefits, and how cloud computing technology is evolving in general. 

Cloud migration is a huge undertaking, but also the start of a new way of working with new opportunities.

If you’re interested in understanding how to migrate your business to the cloud and what it can entail, don’t hesitate to contact us and request a free demo!

Risks and Benefits of Cloud Migration

If you’re anything like most companies, you probably already have at minimum one workload in the cloud. But as you’ll see, the big change that a cloud migration brings is not right for every situation. Cloud environments are usually scalable, reliable, highly available, and easy to use, though there should be more that drives your decision.

Consider a variety of factors when considering your first cloud migration. From the benefits and risks to choosing the right cloud service model for your business, to how it will affect your bottom line. We’ll be discussing the most important aspects to consider when contemplating a move to the cloud.

Benefits of Cloud Migration

Moving to the cloud can solve many problems. These are some of the typical scenarios that can benefit from cloud migration.

Faster scaling to meet traffic demands: Your application is getting more popular. It’s becoming harder to scale resources yourself in order to meet this increasing demand.

Faster go-to-market: Your clients need fast application implementation and deployment. You want to help them focus on development, while also reducing overhead.

Switch from Capex to Opex: Cloud computing transforms IT expenditure into a pay-as-you-go model, instead of spending huge amounts on hardware. This is especially attractive for startups.

Risks of Cloud Migration

Although your particular environment will determine the risks, there are some general drawbacks to cloud migrations you might want to be aware of.

If your current setup meets your needs and doesn’t require much maintenance, scaling, or availability, and all your customers are happy with it – why change?

Distributed cloud architectures may not be the right fit for your application design or architecture. This could mean that you will need to modify them before they can be moved to the cloud.

Cloud platform or vendor lock-in: It can be difficult to move between platforms once you are in.

To learn more about how to keep your cloud environment secure with Cloud Academy, contact us and request a free demo!

Cloud Migration Strategies

There’s a well-known framework for organizing your strategies for cloud migration: this is known as “The 6 Rs of Cloud Migration”. Not every business will perform each step but think of this as a guide to illustrate the many possible paths an organization can take. Once you review their details, you’ll have more context to understand which way to lead your migration strategy.

Rehost

Rehosting is often called “lift and shift”. Just as the name implies, there is no big architectural change to the servers and applications in this situation. They are simply taken from on-premises (the lift) and moved to the same type of system on the cloud (the shift). Organizations that are just starting their migration journey will often use the lift-and-shift strategy.

Replatform

Replatforming is the second option. This is where we modify “lift and shift” into something more complicated but better suited to the new cloud environment. Replatforming is a process that optimizes the application during the migration phase. This requires some programming knowledge and input. You might move from your own database system to a managed DB hosted on a cloud provider. In this type of migration, you stick with similar underlying technology but modify the business model and have cloud resilience as a huge bonus.

Repurchase

Sometimes referred to as “drop and shop,” this cloud migration strategy comprises a full switch to another product. This could mean ending existing licensing or repurposing services for new platforms and services. In this instance, some examples of a “dropped” application may be a CRM system or an industry-specific app that was not created to be run on the cloud.  However, it may be one that does not have modern code or one that cannot be transported from one provider to the next. When transferring to a new product or using a proprietary platform, the “repurpose” strategy is used.

Refactor

Refactoring is the fourth R, which is basically redesigning. This is often driven by a want to improve an application or service. This could be due to various factors such as difficulty in improving the environment or the need to increase the availability and reliability of an application to meet anticipated traffic spikes.

The timing of refactoring is important. While it may be possible to re-architect the application during the migration stage if the application is not mission-critical, It’s generally best to do this later in the project. It’s important to remember that refactoring can take some time and requires expertise.

Retain

Retain is the fifth strategy. Some applications may be too difficult to migrate, so you might want to keep them. This is when you jump into the hybrid space, like many other successful enterprises. There can be various reasons why you might want to keep some of your existing on-premises deployments: if you are currently subject to regulations or have rules regarding the storage or operation of certain aspects of your business applications, services, or data on-premises or in specific areas, this approach may be a good option.

Retire

We now have our final strategy: to retire services. This strategy involves identifying assets that can be retired so that the business can concentrate on services that are most used and have immediate value. This is an interesting way to approach your existing application library because even though there may be big changes to be made, you can see them as opportunities. 

Cloud Migration Process

There are various ways to go about a cloud migration based on the type of strategy you choose or the size of your organization. Below you’ll find two separate processes that illustrate the organization of an actual migration. A helpful exercise would be to use the first process (the 4 Category Method) to ask yourself all the relevant questions then insert those answers into the structure presented by the second method (the Step-by-Step Method).

The 4 Category Method for a Cloud Migration

Use this method to ask yourself some helpful questions about your cloud migration.

1. Plan your cloud migration

• What will your use case be? Specialized just for one application or are you moving a whole suite of applications?

2. Make your cloud migration business case

• How much will moving to the cloud and working in the cloud cost?
• What’s the total cost of ownership between your current environment and the new cloud environment?

3. Execute your cloud migration

• How will you carry out your cloud migration with minimal disruption to your daily operations?
• How will you maintain code and infrastructure for the two environments?
• Does your staff have the skills to execute this migration and what is your evidence?

4. Maintain your new deployments

• How will you maintain the security of your data within your cloud?
• How will you stay up-to-date on newer versions of services?
• How will you make sure your cloud costs don’t spiral out of control?

The Step-by-Step Method for a Basic Cloud Migration

1. Set goals: Your organization can determine whether the migration went smoothly by setting goals against which to measure its success. Think about performance, timeframe, and cost goals – these are concrete numbers to aim towards.
2. Develop a security strategy. Cloud cybersecurity is a different approach to security than on-premises. You’ll need to think about traffic into and within your cloud, but also access to the cloud from all your users, and how to leverage “least privilege” access.
3. Copy existing data to a cloud provider. Make sure this is ongoing throughout the entire migration so you’re positive that your cloud database is always up-to-date.
4. Refactor or rewrite your Business Intelligence: Think about when this has to happen. Consider doing it in pieces  – a custom dashboard can be helpful while larger initiatives get transitioned over.
5. Your cloud is on and running! Mission accomplished and the journey is just beginning.

If you need help doing this, Cloud Academy’s team is here to support you. Contact us and request a free demo today!

Cloud Migration Resources 

Getting started with a cloud migration

You now have a better understanding of the cloud and need to know how to migrate your IT infrastructure. This collection of content will help you understand the best practices and methods to migrate to the cloud.

• Benefits of Cloud Technology for Business: Getting Started With Migration
• Getting Started with Migrating to AWS
• Cloud Adoption Framework – Cloud Skills for Business Teams

Cloud migration technical guides

Want to get detailed info on migration topics such as refactoring, using migration services, and how to maintain security? This selection of content dives deep into technical info to give you a quick look into the nitty-gritty of a migration.

• Refactoring a Monolithic .Net Application to use Cloud Services
• Preparing to Migrate Servers with the Application Discovery Service
• Securing your VPC using Public and Private Subnets

AWS migration resources

Amazon has specific tools and services that help you succeed in your migration. Learn about the migration process, from basics to detailed courses.

• Working with the AWS Migration Service
• AWS Snowcone: Providing Portable Edge Computing and Data Transfer
• .Net Microservices – Refactor and Design – Course One

Microsoft Azure migration resources

An Azure migration often includes other enterprise services besides the actual cloud infrastructure. Learn how to integrate all these for a successful deployment.

• Migrating Servers To Azure
• Planning Office 365 Workloads and Applications
• Designing an SAP to Azure Migration Strategy

Google Cloud migration resources

This collection of Google Cloud content highlights how to migrate, maintain, and automate your Google infrastructure.

• ​​Google Professional Cloud Architect Exam Preparation
• Google Cloud Digital Leader – Database Migration
• Deploying Google Cloud Platform Infrastructure with Terraform

If you want to be guided step by step, contact us and request a free demo. Cloud Academy’s team will be happy to help your business!

Cloud Migration Tools

Cloud migration tools are crucial to a successful cloud strategy. They are offered by the major cloud providers as well as third-party vendors for when you want to go multi-cloud. Tools from cloud providers are usually free but you need to pay for services used – such as compute and storage – while third-party tools are cloud-agnostic but come with a cost. Experiment with these options to get insights to help in your cloud migration.

AWS migration tools

• AWS Migration Hub — Assess and track your migration across tools.
• AWS Application Delivery Service — Gather data on your existing on-premises setup to help estimate total cost of cloud ownership.
• AWS Application Migration Service — Lift and shift your applications directly to AWS with their most up-to-date tool.
• AWS Database Migration Service — Migrate your databases to AWS with low downtime and simple procedures.

Azure migration tools

• Azure Migrate — Assess and migrate on-premises VMs to Azure.
• Data Migration Assistant — Assists in modernizing databases during a migration by finding incompatibilities and suggesting improvements.
• Azure Database Migration Service — Migrates on-premises databases to Azure.

Google Cloud migration tools

• Google Cloud Rapid Assessment & Migration Program (RAMP) – Understand best practices for all aspects of your migration to Google Cloud.
• Application migration – A comprehensive look at a portfolio of application migration options with Google Cloud.
• Database Migration Service – Simplified migrations for SQL databases.

Alicloud migration tools

• Server Migration Center – A comprehensive platform to migrate servers, containers, and data.
• Alibaba Cloud Pricing – Get general and thorough pricing info for the platform; useful for estimating costs of different services.

Pricing and advice tools

• AWS Migration Evaluator – Get cost estimates and build a business case for an AWS migration.
• Azure Migrate Pricing – Get cost info for the Migrate service plus insights into third party tool licenses
• Migrate for Compute Engine and Transferring your large datasets – Get cost and process advice for workload and data migration to Google Cloud.

Migrating a company’s digital assets to the Cloud can be an exciting and rewarding project for a business. If done correctly, the benefits and opportunities are significant, but if executed poorly, fixing the mistakes can cost more than the entire project.

In fact, according to a recent study conducted by Flexera, more than 75% of respondents cited inadequacy and expertise as one of the top challenges to cloud migration. This makes having the right team with the right skills critical to a successful cloud adoption. If you are interested in assessing the skills of your tech team, or want to learn more about our robust course library and certification programs, contact one of our knowledgeable experts for a free demo today.

FAQ

Can you store sensitive information in the cloud?

Depending on how sensitive the data is that your application stores and retrieves, you might not be able to maintain it in the cloud. Often, there are compliance requirements that also limit your choices of where and how to store sensitive data such as medical personal identifiable information (PII).

Can you deploy any technology in the cloud?

If some of the technology you use is proprietary, you might not be legally able to deploy it to the cloud.

Does the cloud make applications slower?

It can happen that some applications will experience latency, based on the location of both the application and the user.

Will I get full insight into my cloud’s performance?

Since the actual cloud hardware is controlled by someone else (i.e. the cloud provider and not your organization), when debugging performance issues you could lose some transparency and control.

Will I ever run out of storage in the cloud?

In theory, no. In reality, the limiting factor is your budget. However, it can become more and more expensive and time-consuming to keep up with on-premises storage, whereas with cloud storage you have scalability plus ways to minimize cost such as calculators and alerts.

How effective are cloud disaster recovery systems vs. on-premises ones?

Very effective. Cloud disaster recovery systems are faster to implement because you don’t have to purchase more hardware and they have ready-to-use disaster recovery plans that meet industry standards.

Will I have to maintain and update my server software in the cloud?

Oftentimes no. In certain cases, the cloud provider will take care of this automatically. Also, some cloud computing models make lots of administrative tasks such as database backup, software upgrades, and periodic maintenance easier by handling them for you.

The post What is Cloud Migration? Strategy, Processes, Benefits & Risks appeared first on Cloud Academy.

If your company is about to shift from in-house storage to a cloud-based one, use this article as a guide on how to monitor the transition. Moving huge amounts of data is a process that rarely goes flawlessly from the beginning, and you don’t want to find problems once the process is over.

Plan your migration well

Planning in business is one of the most important things, as having a proper business plan helps reduce risks. The first step towards successful monitoring of cloud migration is knowing what you will do while transferring data. You need to get acquainted with the architecture of the cloud system you’re migrating to. It may have and probably does have dependencies that were not a part of your in-house setup. Those need to be accounted for.

You also need to study the productivity and resource utilization of different cloud instances in your environment. With in-house systems, especially those with limited resources, processes are often tailored to the hardware limitations. Those limitations will probably differ in your cloud solution, and you need to know what you have to change.

Once you gather enough information about the system you’re migrating to and its differences from the one you already had, you will have a clear cloud migration roadmap and know what to focus on.

Know what to monitor

Each business and platform will have a slightly different set of key areas that require attention during cloud migration monitoring. However, most migrations will have several similar areas that you need to focus on. These include:

Infrastructure

The first thing you should monitor in cloud migration is the correct infrastructure usage. Since some dependencies and processes can change depending on the platform you are using, you want to make sure that everything goes according to plan when it comes to the correct placement of objects within the new infrastructure. Above that, you need to monitor that everything is functioning smoothly and no resource bottlenecks are formed as your initial plan may have been weak.

Another point to focus on is how much storage and processing power are used. Not having enough storage room is obviously a downside, but having too much available can eat into your budget. That aspect has to be monitored as well.

Outside availability

Correct configuration within the platform is just as important as your solution being available to connected apps and platforms. If you’re using outside apps that are crucial for the functioning of your business automation or business analytics, you need to monitor how well these apps are communicating with the cloud platform you’re moving to.

Traffic

If what your organization is migrating is not simply an internal business intelligence solution but a service, your engineering team will have to take a closer look at traffic. When Spotify migrated to the cloud from their on-premise servers, the development team closely followed user interaction with the new cloud system.

The main focus was on requests arriving correctly and on time and being processed without errors or maintaining the same error rate as the previous solution. The end goal of cloud migration is to cut data management costs while keeping the quality of the services you provide the same or better, so monitoring this aspect of the migration is crucial.

Cost

The financial aspect of cloud migration is important, so cost is the next thing to monitor. The whole idea behind transferring your database to the cloud is that you can do it without unnecessary resources and cutting costs since acquiring new processing power or storage room is seamless and not as expensive as with on-premises solutions.

Most major cloud storage providers like AWS have tools dedicated to monitoring costs that your organization incurs during the migration process and after. 

Security

Lastly, a very important aspect that should be monitored during cloud migration is the security of the whole system. Cloud is often on the edge of security tech, but every system designed to be secure can be ruined with incorrect implementation. That’s why your team has to follow closely all security procedures and requests coming and going within the network to ensure all security protocols and best practices are implemented correctly.

One of the most important skills in cloud computing tech will come in handy here – cloud collaboration. Most cloud migrations are not one-sided, as two teams usually work together. Collaborating to improve cloud security is one of the most important things both teams can do.

Cloud migration monitoring tools

When it comes to cloud migration monitoring options, your choice is not that broad, but the features you get with each tool are enough to ensure a seamless transition. If you’re working with one of the three cloud giants, AWS, MS Azure, or GCP, you can use their respective free monitoring tools. All of these are sufficiently well-made to provide for all monitoring needs and are tailored to the respective platforms.

The other choice is using third-party cloud migration tools like Carbonite or Cloudscape. The benefit of using those is that you may receive a more customizable solution. Remember that it will take more work to set every aspect of monitoring in place, especially if the company has not done integrations with your new platform yet.

The ultimate cloud migration tip

As with many other things in business and life, planning is the most crucial thing in the cloud migration process. No amount of monitoring can save you from a situation bordering a disaster if the initial plan is poor.

When Spotify migrated from their on-site servers to Google Cloud Platform, it took them two years of planning. You may have a smaller amount of data to move, and it may take a bit less time than that, but when you do not cut costs on planning, you will not end up paying twice.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Effective Cloud Migration Monitoring appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Of course, you’ll need your entire team on board, and that can be one of the trickiest parts of the journey to navigate. It’s simply not enough to adopt tools and tell your teams to start using them. However, fostering these four cloud competencies will help your team recognize new product opportunities and develop innovative solutions—increasing your ROI.

In this post, we’ll introduce the four essential cloud competencies, examine why they’re important, and share insights to help you develop them in your teams.

1. Awareness of Cloud Tools and Services

As with any journey, you can’t get anywhere until you know where you’re going. You may assume that everyone is aware of what cloud tools and services are available in their fields of expertise. While that may well be true for technical groups, like IT and development, it’s probably less so in areas that are less tied to technology, such as finance and HR.

In any case, not knowing about cloud tools and services and how they can help optimize processes may hold team members back from performing their tasks efficiently and effectively. And, of course, you need to bring leadership up to speed, too.

For example, analytics and AI are a big growth area right now, with a range of tools on offer to aid processes in almost every field. Being aware of which cloud tools are relevant to your goals will ensure that your entire organization benefits from the cloud transformation.

2. Cloud Proficiency

There are a number of reasons organizations transition to the cloud, but all of them hinge on ROI, a performance measure that evaluates how efficiently your organization is working in order to serve customers or attain other business goals, such as cutting costs. Yet you’ll only realize ROI in these areas if your team knows how to access and use cloud services properly.

It’s also important to consider that not using these services properly can result in massive security risks, such as leaving unencrypted confidential data—or even passwords and encryption keys themselves—inadvertently exposed in public repositories. 

Clearly, you’ll start seeing actual business benefits when your teams are proficient in using cloud tools and services securely, effectively, and economically. That’s why it’s essential to bring your teams up to speed as quickly as possible.

3. Ability to Leverage Cloud Tools and Services

As mentioned above, you’ll only start seeing ROI once your teams begin developing fluency in cloud tools. However, fluency merely allows team members to continue doing their jobs. With a higher cloud competency level, they’ll be able to solve business problems by applying cloud tools in creative and constructive ways.

For example, your team can leverage cloud tools to provide better customer service, thanks to flexible resource allocation, zero-downtime SLAs, faster access to the information they need, and more including reaping advantages of cloud storage.

But remember: These benefits don’t just happen automatically. Your team members need to acquire the first two competencies—awareness and proficiency—before they can start applying their knowledge creatively to improve your business.

4. Skill in Cloud Collaboration

Too often, different teams end up working in parallel—duplicating each others’ efforts; wasting time, money, and energy; and potentially introducing errors. The problem isn’t the cloud tools or services themselves; it’s a lack of collaboration. 

Collaboration brings together multiple aspects of your organization, such as IT, HR, development, operations, manufacturing, and fulfillment—the sky’s the limit. Rather than focusing on individual goals, these teams can work toward shared strategic goals, such as industry-leading innovation or superior user experience. (Don’t worry; individual departments benefit from collaboration, too!). 

With this competency, your teams will be able to identify areas of overlap so they can start introducing efficiencies. This is sometimes described as “breaking down silos,” but can be more constructively viewed as harnessing the best practices of all groups or departments.

The ability to build collaborative skills depends on organizational culture—groups or departments should never feel as though they are competing for limited resources. Instead, they should understand that they are collaborating to create a better organization and provide better service all around. This is a message which must come from above in order to help bring all teams on board.

All In It Together

Obviously, not every employee needs to be brought up to speed with every competency. Managers and technical teams, for example, will need to be more proficient in more tools and services than other employees who are simply using them. But of course, regardless of level and responsibility, every employee needs to master the tools and skills relevant to their job. And ideally, they’ll be able to work better following true cloud transformation.

Employees at all levels need to understand how cloud security concerns impact their work. And understanding how cloud tools will make their work easier, safer, and more efficient will increase buy-in. Yet, too often, getting buy-in from team members is difficult due to the massive changes that come with cloud transformation. 

To make sure nothing falls through the cracks, Cloud Academy has created a complete guide to help you plan for success at every stage of your journey to the cloud. It will show you how the four competencies we discussed in this article come together in real life by walking you step-by-step through the cloud transformation of a 10,000-person financial services company.

You’ll also explore:

• The five stages of the cloud journey
• Common pitfalls of cloud migration
• Essential metrics to define and measure success
• And much more

Cloud Academy can help you bring your employees up to speed on the competencies they need to succeed in the cloud. Download the guide to find out how. 

The post 4 Cloud Competencies Essential to Enterprise Migration appeared first on Cloud Academy.

But you’re not getting as much out of it as you could be. That can be frustrating, especially as you’re seeing other companies taking off and getting ahead, seeing big business gains and strategic wins by breaking down silos and innovating on a dime.

How can your company start enjoying these benefits of cloud transformation? The only way to catch up is to take the plunge and begin migrating your business processes into the cloud

But you’re also well aware that many cloud migration projects fail—up to 74%, according to one study, which defined “failure” as having to move business applications back out of cloud and onto company-owned infrastructure.

You don’t want to be part of that statistic. So how can you protect yourself, avoid cloud risk, and steer clear of the most common mistakes? In this post, we’ll take a quick look at 5 of the biggest pitfalls of cloud migration. You’ll find out why even smart companies make these major mistakes and then discover how to protect yourself.

 1. Lack of C-Level Buy-In

Let’s be honest: Without buy-in from the upper echelons, it’s tough getting any big project off the ground.

But to overcome objections, it’s very important to understand the mindset of individuals at this level. They’re not necessarily opposed to cloud; they may actually believe you are already using cloud. And they’re probably right—so you’ll have to communicate exactly what the difference is between using one or two cloud applications and a full, company-wide cloud migration.

They may also have issues with budgeting for cloud adoption based on the mistaken belief that cloud is free, open-source, or easy to implement—none of which is true.

Yet buy-in at this level is essential, so you’ll need to overcome that resistance to make the transition possible. Why do projects fail due to lack of support?

• Without a reasonable budget, departments are on their own.
• Cloud adoption takes place in “affordable” chunks that fly under the budget radar, but with no overall plan, strategy, or sense of unity.
• Some departments may transition to cloud while others don’t, creating inefficiencies.
• Cloud transformation isn’t tied to business goals, so it could be unfunded as priorities shift.

For all these reasons, and to build understanding and buy-in, it’s important to work with C-level, mapping out the entire project and anchoring it to solid business objectives, deliverables, and KPIs for accountability.

TIP: Present the project in terms of ROI and gains in efficiencies and you’ll be well on your way to persuading your company’s leadership.

2. Biting Off More Than You Can Chew

Some businesses have the opposite problem: too much C-level buy-in. How can that be a problem? Executives who are overly enthusiastic about cloud often decide to make too great a leap in too short a time.

Going from zero to a hundred overnight is never a good idea when adopting anything new. All quality transitions take time. Cloud is no exception, even if there are cloud-based versions of everything these days.

Rushing in without a transition plan generally takes what’s known as a “lift-and-shift” approach. This means you’re taking all your old processes and simply “translating” them into cloud versions.

If you don’t take the time before the transition to reevaluate your workflows and processes, you’re simply recreating existing processes in the cloud. And that includes recreating inefficiencies that you’d be much better off without! Plus, you’ll be taking on a massive project, most likely with staff who are untrained and unready to take over with new, cloud-based tools and services.

With too much enthusiasm, biting off more than you can chew, you probably won’t reap the promised efficiencies of cloud, and the odds of successful cloud transition fall steeply.

It’s far better to take things a little slower and plan the process carefully, upskilling employees where necessary, to make sure everyone’s ready when you do make the transition.

TIP: Get all stakeholders together, working to spot inefficiencies and reinvent workflows wherever you can.

3. Lack of Leadership

Many cloud migration projects go off the rails because, simply put, nobody’s in charge. In this case, we’re not talking about the C-level, but rather about actual leadership on the ground. Whether it’s a single point person or an interdisciplinary team, it helps to have one place where you can say “the buck stops here.”

This person or team can provide reporting and accountability to all levels. They can also:

• Communicate to employees what’s going on
• Describe expectations going forward (such as meeting training goals)
• Serve as a listening ear to team member needs and requests
• Ensure data is collected to track essential metrics early on

With the clear sense of leadership and motivation this leadership provides, the project is far more likely to succeed.

TIP: The point person or transition team lead may have unique cloud training needs to handle this complex facilitation role.

4. Assuming Staff Already Have the Skills

In many ways, cloud services have been designed for ease of use and integration. However, that doesn’t mean your team can just hit the ground running.

Lack of skills among team members is a major reason for delays in cloud migration of up to two years, according to Gartner. While lift and shift might help bypass this problem temporarily, Gartner says, “lift-and-shift projects do not develop native-cloud skills,” which will be more and more necessary over the longer term.

Cloud transition inevitably demands new tools and new adaptations to existing processes. That will take training, and it may take time.

This is absolutely not the place to cut corners. As you put a plan in place for cloud transition, be sure you are upskilling your team at the same time. Determine exactly which aspects/types of training are necessary for which employees:

• Based on their role descriptions
• Based on the organization’s needs

Some companies wonder whether it is more cost-effective to bring on qualified cloud personnel with the requisite skills rather than upskilling current employees. Given the high cost of new hires, along with the fact that all employees are going to need some training in the new tools and services, it is usually more affordable to provide appropriate skills training. That is especially true with tools to streamline, simplify, and automate your training programs. 

TIP: Employees are more likely to respond positively if they are given clear and logical training expectations.

5. Failure to Adequately Plan for Security

The security piece of the cloud transition can be tricky to manage because many organizations don’t realize they have a problem—until it’s too late.

Often, an organization is left vulnerable because IT processes aren’t transitioned, but simply lifted and shifted. Fortunately, some of the steps mentioned above will help prevent this pitfall. For instance, having a single point of responsibility (whether an individual or a group) for the transition as a whole will help make sure that sensitive data and assets can’t fall through the cracks.

Providing your team with cloud training—appropriate to their role and responsibilities—can also ensure that they understand new cloud-based tools and environments and can configure them securely. For example, familiarity with cloud computing security best practices, such as CISSP certification, is highly recommended for members of your security team.

Gaps in cloud security are invisible, and they’re easy to neglect in the excitement of the transition to the cloud. But failure to plan can cancel out cloud savings in the long run, so plan wisely ahead of time.

TIP: Choose tools during your cloud migration that will give you the greatest possible visibility into your cloud-based assets and security.

Get Started on Your Journey

The journey to the cloud can be complex. As we’ve seen here, there are many potential cloud pitfalls. Failure isn’t just theoretical—it happens every day. Many companies make the transition and then discover that they have to backpedal because their team simply can’t make the promise of cloud a reality.

That doesn’t have to be you. And the transition doesn’t have to be chaos and calamity. All it takes is thorough advance planning. That’s why we’ve put together a complete guide to help you plan for success at every single stage of your journey to the cloud.

Journey to the Cloud: A Guide for Enterprise Cloud Transformation walks you step-by-step through the cloud transformation of a typical 10,000-person financial-services enterprise so you can see how the principles we’ve mentioned here, and many more, come together in real life.

You’ll discover:

• The five stages of the journey
• The four cloud competencies your team must have
• Essential metrics to define and measure success
• …and much more

Download the white paper today.

Feature Photo Credit @kwinkunks (https://www.flickr.com/photos/kwinkunks/9889935716)

The post The Top 5 Pitfalls of Cloud Migration — And How to Avoid Them appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Use them as a framework when you sit down for a discussion with your stakeholders — you’ll be better able to create a solid foundation for your changes.

As we begin, let’s recall that every cloud migration is going to be unique, and that these “6 R” strategies are not meant to be definitive or mutually exclusive. They also definitely are not the only way you can define your situation, but what we’re after is a framework for talking points, a blueprint for starting discussions and guidelines.

This version of the six R’s of cloud migration was taken from our recent webinar Journey to the Cloud: Top Strategies for Migration Success.

Rehost

Rehosting is commonly referred to as lift and shift. Right now, lift and shift is generally as it sounds —  lifting servers or applications from their current hosting environment, which is generally going to be on-prem —  and shifting them to infrastructure in the public cloud and rehosting. The lift-and-shift strategy is a very common strategy for organizations starting out on their migration journey. 

There are significant benefits to running servers on the scalable, pay-as-you-go infrastructure of a cloud platform. It’s a relatively low-resistance migration strategy, and it’s a great strategy for working backward from a fixed constraint or a hard deadline. For example, if we need to get something off our current infrastructure by November because we know it’s not going to be able to deal with the input of our October sales, in practice the application server will be exported using a third-party export tool like VMware’s vCenter. You can use any sort of virtualization service and create an image and that’s exported and imported into a cloud compute service. We can containerize things. The process is relatively simple; it doesn’t require a lot of technology, and it doesn’t require a lot of expertise.

Replatform

The second option is replatforming, and this is where we modify “lift and shift.” Replatforming involves making some optimizations to the application during the migration stage, so that does require some programming input and expertise. For example, you might end up moving from your own relational database system to a turnkey managed RDS on a cloud provider — same underlying tech, different business model with cloud resiliency auto-added.

Repurchase

This is sometimes referred to as “drop and shop,” as it refers to a decision to move to another product. This may mean ending existing licensing and repurposing services on new platforms or services. Examples you may have are a CRM system or an industry-specific application not designed to run on cloud infrastructures. This is often not necessarily a custom application, but it can be one that doesn’t have modern application code, or it could be a situation where it’s not possible to transport the code from one provider to another. The “repurpose” strategy is often applied when using a proprietary database platform or a proprietary product and moving to something else.

Refactor

The fourth R is refactoring, which is basically re-architecting. This is usually driven by a strong desire to improve a service or application. Drivers for this might be difficulty making improvements to the current environment, or a requirement to improve availability and reliability of the application immediately for an anticipated burst of traffic and activity. 

The solution is to refactor this application so that it can handle that type of burst activity. If it’s not a mission-critical service, then it may be possible to re-architect during the migration stage (i.e., refactoring is feasible during the first stage of a migration if you do not have a time constraint). Otherwise, it’s most likely better to complete this in a later phase of the project. This is just something to keep in mind, because one of the key problems with refactoring is that it’s going to take a little bit of time and expertise.

Retain

The fifth strategy is to retain. You may want to retain portions of your IT portfolio because there are some applications that you’re not ready to migrate and you feel more comfortable keeping them on-premises, or you may need to do so for compliance reasons. With this use case, it may make sense to retain aspects of your IT services in the current environment and implement a hybrid or part migration strategy. This approach makes sense if you’re currently regulated or you have constitution rules that require you to store or run some aspects of your services or business applications on-premises or within specific regions.

Retire

This brings us to our last strategy, which is to retire services. This strategy involves identifying assets and services that can be turned off so the business can focus on services that are widely used and of immediate value. This is a really interesting approach because you can start to look at your applications quite differently — you start to see these big changes as opportunities and you ponder refactoring one thing, rehosting another. It’s a very exciting starting point, but like some of the other strategies, it will involve technical teams to make sure things are done correctly. 

Scale responsibly, my friends

Change doesn’t happen overnight, and a cloud migration is no different. In our recent webinar, Journey to the Cloud: Top Strategies for Migration Success, we discussed just that.

Watch it on demand!

Feature Photo Credit @scobleizer (https://www.flickr.com/photos/scobleizer/4870003098)

The post The 6 R’s of Cloud Migration appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Check out the rest of the series here:

• Part 1 – Define Your Strategy
• Part 2 – Start Planning
• Part 3 – Assess Readiness
• Part 4 – Adopt a Cloud-First Mindset

Be sure to subscribe to our blog to be notified when new content goes live!

Get tactical

At this point in your journey, the goals are clearly defined, the business is operating on cloud infrastructure, and the organization is bought in across the board. That doesn’t mean your work is done. Now is the time to constantly examine your original KPIs, measure performance, and make the move toward continuous improvement.

Look for opportunities for additional cost savings and optimizations. Your goals may have changed a bit since your journey began, but they should generally be the same. Tap into department heads to better understand how your company’s shift to the cloud has saved time and money for specific business capabilities. Then, report those positive results to prove ROI to leadership and discuss how to continually optimize them.

Adjust accordingly

Modern enterprises — especially those with cloud infrastructures — move fast. While the KPIs you originally set up should still be relevant, now is the time to reexamine and get more granular. Think about other ways you can leverage the cloud and grow the business, and still prove ROI.

Focus on key metrics, i.e., latency, network availability, and overhead costs. These areas of focus affect both the customer experience and the commercial performance of the business, meaning they appeal to all stakeholders. Keeping a finger on the pulse of your cloud configuration is essential for ongoing cloud management and iteration.

Provide ongoing education

Companies are moving fast because the technologies that power them are moving faster. That’s what makes managing a tech team so difficult. If left alone, there is simply no way individuals can keep pace with every new software update, product release, or programming language — especially if they are working a full-time job.

Invest in continuous, always up-to-date upskilling. The best way to recognize new ways to create value on your cloud transformation journey is to empower those who work on and with your systems every day. Leverage an enterprise training platform that is built for the modern digital age. Keeping everyone in the know and speaking the same language will mobilize your workforce to thrive in a world of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

Ready, Set…Cloud!

If you’d like an abridged version of what this blog series has covered in-depth, this guide is a great start. We share some best practices and insights gained from our experience helping many organizations on their journey to cloud success.

The post Cloud Migration Series (Step 5 of 5): Manage & Iterate appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog to be notified when new content goes live!

Adopt a Cloud-First Mindset

Why should you adopt a cloud-first mindset? As you start on your cloud migration goals, it’s going to be key to repeatedly come back to the fundamentals as people lose focus or enthusiasm. We’re talking about the phenomenon known as the “trough of sorrow” where a dip in initiative and output occurs, usually when novelty wears off and learning becomes harder.

To be prepared, it’s important to refer back to your fundamental goals. The new mentality at your organization will consist of the following key understandings, which will eventually become part of the healthy baseline culture:

• Being aware of cloud tools and services — this is the what in terms of the cloud: understanding the landscape, the providers, and the language so you can have a conversation with stakeholders, vendors, and consultants.
• Being able to use cloud services effectively, economically, and safely — this is the how, part 1: Safety and economy first. You don’t want to cause any more problems or spend budget unwisely.
• Understanding how to apply cloud tools to solve customer problems — this is the how, part 2: The other side of being able to use cloud tools safely is being able to apply them to real-world problem-solving.
• Being able to use your cloud services together to create new products and solutions — this is the why: This piggybacks on the previous point…whether it’s a service or a product, you’re going to want to take advantage of the opportunity to make something new first in the market.

Getting through these steps is a cycle, an ongoing process. As mentioned at the beginning, one part of the journey that always happens as a large group progresses on a big change is the “trough of sorrow.” 

There are always going to be peaks and valleys in your progress, and the faster you can get back to your goals, the better — so how do you do that? There are a few ways to build back momentum.

Certification campaigns

Our practitioners and instructors at Cloud Academy have had lots of opportunities to interact with enterprises at various parts of their cloud transition. What we’ve seen in other engagements is that internally commenced certification campaigns can provide personal motivation to individual team members. These cert campaigns help team members commit to gaining new domain knowledge.

Further, when leaders can incentivize people to get core certifications for a desired specialty — i.e., AI certifications on Azure in order to develop solutions — this helps the employees’ own professional development while at the same time putting the overall team in a strong position to tackle new product initiatives.

Product teams brought up to speed

Remember that it’s not just IT and engineering that needs to be educated and fluent in cloud. For your team to gain maximum benefit from the full offering of cloud technologies, you’ll need all product-oriented roles to be aware of how cloud-based services such as artificial intelligence tools and services can be applied to solve business issues. As a starting point, evaluate areas where you may be struggling with data. Can a turnkey AI solution help here? If not, what types of changes would need to take place in order to leverage some of the positives of a managed service (and later down the road, a custom-built service)?

Unsure of some of your staff’s levels? Get back to basics

We’re going to continue beating the drum on this, but it’s helpful: you will need to assess your entire team’s skill levels, and continually monitor as time goes on. This sounds like a lot of work, which is why a programmatic approach that can scale with your organization is the ideal way to keep learning momentum moving across the board.

Just make sure that the learnings are outcome-oriented: whether it’s certifications, specific job roles, or specific technical tasks, the learning paths that your employees take should have a clear goal.

The last challenge: working together

Once you take all these steps you’ll get back on track, and all teams will become aware of how to solve business issues. But let’s be honest: there will always be the challenge of getting people to work together.

To put it bluntly, the big challenge is how do we get people in cross-functional teams to work together with all these new services and practices?  

The answer is to run practical exercises. These need to be cross-functional projects that are engaging, quick to start, and quick to yield results.

Engagement + Collaboration = Progress

What would be a practical exercise and why would it help? Find a partner with domain expertise both in cloud and upskilling employees, and you’ll be able to get guidance to create blueprint-like exercises that can be applied to projects.

These blueprints can work across teams, with contributions across IT, Engineering, Product, and collaboration between all managers. Further, the bar for the learning experiences gets higher every year, with learners wanting the ability to have very little friction when learning (think about coding labs starting in 30 seconds vs. 3 hours of installing and troubleshooting software). It also makes more and more sense to learn together with coworkers, as opposed to the current single-player experience. This shows that the area of collaboration is set to be huge and will drive a better user experience and faster, more communal learning.

Conclusion

This type of engagement at the individual and communal level, with real-time tracking and modification of progress and goals, is going to be key to helping any team stay focused as they go through their cloud transformation. Understand that no matter the size of the organization, there will need to be attention paid to learners and managers as their attention naturally wavers. Having a concrete plan before addressing this makes it infinitely easier to address natural speed bumps and challenges as they occur in the learning and cloud migration process.

Ready, Set…Cloud!

If you’d like a preview of what our blog series will cover in a more in-depth fashion, this guide is a great start. We share some best practices and insights gained from our experience helping many organizations on their journey to cloud success. Use it as a helpful reminder to stay on track.

The post Cloud Migration Series (Step 4 of 5): Adopt a Cloud-First Mindset appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog to be notified when new content goes live!

Assessing your ready state

Last time, we talked about detailed planning that forms the foundation of your cloud migration effort. Now it’s time to really understand what your team can do, and how you can help them get to a place where they’re empowered to enact a big organizational shift.

Making a big change like this is a huge undertaking when you work in a large organization. There’s little guidance out there for executive teams on just how much learning effort is required to turn the ship around. What’s needed is to have your Learning & Development team present a clear direction on the training goals — the result will go far to ensure that things go smoothly.  

Why is the buy-in from L&D important? Some of the biggest mistakes happen in the early stages of cloud adoption when enthusiasm for new tasks and appetite for experimentation is high, but knowledge of best practices is low or non-existent. In order to get into a cloud console and start doing things, your staff doesn’t necessarily need to pass a cloud certification exam before they can spin up instances. It’s easy for people to make expensive mistakes in the early stages of adoption if they don’t know or understand the proper operating procedures. L&D needs to be the first line of defense in the first stages. 

So our first goal needs to be understanding where your team stands with regard to technical skills, followed by a plan to get them to a ready state to accomplish the technical goals that you laid out in the planning phase.

Readiness is both a state and a process

You’ll start by accurately pinpointing your team’s baseline skills. Once they are on track, you’ll then want to upskill them again to make sure they stay up to date with constantly changing cloud technology.

This brings us to a main point. As you assess your team, grow their skills, and make sure they’re on track, you’ll realize that this is actually a process of continuous development. Just like agile software teams that work in sprints and constantly deploy code updates to certain parts of an app in order to stay current and update products, the readiness stage of your cloud migration is the same. It will be a culture change for your organization, one with positive impacts because your teams will be ready, and will be motivated by individual and group growth and success.

Here are some highlights of what a readiness program should entail:

Pre-assessment

To get started, you’ll need to determine your team’s current skills and capabilities. This means creating a breakdown for each individual member that can be updated as they progress through their learnings.

Skill Assessment

You don’t want to be in the dark about your team’s abilities, so you’ll need a full view in order to build on each member’s development. This helps you predictably upskill talent so you know exactly when they’re ready to tackle that new project. Useful metrics will include strengths, weaknesses, and areas of opportunity.

When you think about it, the ROI of your tech stack is only as strong as your team members operating on it. You’ll need to use the insights from multiple skill assessments to paint a picture of broader skill coverage, ideally from the individual, team, and organization level.

Dashboards

Yes, dashboards are all the rage and will continue to be so, for good reason. A well-designed dashboard helps you cleanly separate signals from the noise.

Ideally your dashboard to monitor organization readiness will contain the following items:

• ability to assign assessments
• current skill levels
• an organization of teams that effectively mirrors your internal organization

These seem like simple things, but they often get overlooked. It’s key to focus on these tenets because while the many programs roll out in tandem, it will be easy to get overwhelmed with too much information.

Cloud-first: four key goals to keep in mind

It bears repeating that there will be a lot going on in your organization. This readiness and learning stage of a cloud migration is going to set you up for success as you adopt a cloud-first mindset. 

The new mentality at your organization will consist of the following key understandings, which will eventually become part of the healthy baseline culture.

1. Being aware of cloud tools and services
2. Being able to use cloud services effectively, economically, and safely
3. Understanding how to apply cloud tools to solve customer problems
4. Being able to use your cloud services together to create new products and solutions

Conclusion

This is exciting stuff — changes, new technology, opportunity for growth. In part 4 of our series, we’ll delve into maintaining that cloud-first mentality, especially when the going gets tough and real-life challenges invariably pop up to get in your way.

Ready, Set…Cloud!

If you’d like a preview of what our blog series will cover in a more in-depth fashion, this guide is a great start. We share some best practices and insights gained from our experience helping many organizations on their journey to cloud success. Use it as a helpful reminder to stay on track.

The post Cloud Migration Series (Step 3 of 5): Assess Readiness appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog to be notified when new content goes live!

Start planning your cloud migration

You’ve defined your cloud strategy. You understand why you want to take a journey to the cloud. Now that the high-level strategy is done, let’s focus on the nitty-gritty and the details. It’s time to make a plan for making the big change. Don’t get discouraged, as it’s going to be a lot of work. That’s why we’ve created this series to help you.

Budget for the journey

You’re going to have to sit down and have a realistic conversation with your technical leads and executives about how much a cloud migration is going to cost. Let’s be clear, a migration from legacy systems is not like flipping a switch, nor is it a one-time affair. Rather, like most change that lasts, it’s a process with milestones. 

As you go through the continuum of change, you’ll eventually leave some or all of your legacy systems behind (depending on your views on hybrid cloud). But as that is happening, you’ll need to maintain old systems, scale new systems, and make sure you have the right employee talent to keep things progressing forward. 

A few key facets to consider:

• Current budget and fiscal year considerations
• Ideal timeframe for transition
• Product roadmap, short- and long-term

Check your infrastructure

Before you dive in and take the whole organization with you, let’s take a look at what’s being developed in the various groups in your business. Some of these might be more translatable to the cloud, such as lightweight mobile apps. But remember, there are so many cool technologies and buzzwords out there (Kubernetes, agile, data lakes, real-time everything) — you have to think hard about whether there’s really a business case to jumping in. 

For example, maybe you run a monolithic app that’s been your bread and butter for years. Maybe it’s worth it to host the app in the cloud, but not change to microservices. Instead, since you’ve taken a good look at your product roadmap you might spin off a new product that can then benefit from some quick cloud-based solutions, such as turnkey managed services like AI libraries or data analysis.

Initial organizational alignment

The last thing you want is for people to leave meetings about your migration and have nothing happen. Fast forward six months and progress has been scattershot, not much morale, and zero inertia. But let’s not focus on the negative…what are actionable steps to take to guarantee forward movement?

In part one we talked about organizational buy-in. A good way to maintain internal accountability is to create a multi-disciplinary “Tiger Team” — a group of individuals who can meet to maintain focus and ensure that separate groups don’t become too siloed.

Modify this to your own needs and don’t bog people down with fluff, but do hold them accountable, whether it’s by unintrusive meetings or reports to leadership. Remember, this effort has to be supported from above, as a positive culture starting from the top can be contagious. 

Assess your team

How are you going to get your team from point A to point B? Will they be ready to not just take steps toward a migration, but toward creating products in a new way?

Your product, engineering, and IT teams are experienced in designing, creating, testing, and deploying monolithic applications. They probably have some experience in cloud technology already, and it’s more than certain that they have a deep curiosity to learn more: that’s part of the creator’s mindset and that’s why they’re in this field.

Now you need to establish a baseline for where their skills are, how that aligns with your strategy and planning, and how to raise their skills to meet your strategy.

Develop a skills readiness plan

If you want to create an effective plan for your employees’ technical growth, you need a good way to assess their skills and develop them at scale. We’ll review this more in part three of this series, but here’s an overview of how it’s done.

Start by accurately pinpointing baseline skills

• Test competence across multiple cloud platforms and technologies and track skill improvement
• Test practical, hands-on tech skills
• Streamline the assessment process with automated reminders
• Understand where your team stands and how fast they’re growing

Quickly increase technical capabilities

• Drive skill growth with hands-on cloud training programs built to master AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DevOps
• Build and assign training plans with 10,000+ hours of up-to-date cloud training
• Keep your team accountable with built-in reminders and weekly reports
• Track progress and completion on a real-time dashboard

Confidently know when your team is ready

• Measure practical expertise through skill reports based on hands-on assessments.
• Challenge your team with lab scenarios using actual AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud accounts
• Establish a data-driven approach to learning and skills management
• Understand your team’s strengths and identify skill gaps

Cloud adoption plan

Migrating to the cloud isn’t just about technology. The mindset and the repeated, tactful reminders to stay on course help to make all the difference.

You’ll find that one of the main challenges with transformation projects is keeping a clear sense of direction. Often with a transformation project, there isn’t a dedicated project resource to run it. That means it’s easy for people on the ground to lose focus a bit and end up working in silos or vacuums. Confusion can set in and the wheels can quickly fall off — everyone loses interest and inertia. 

What can make a significant difference is when learning and development have a clear program structure to drive the behavioral outcomes that leadership wants to see. This can be the backbone to build your cloud adoption plan on.

On top of this framework, you can start to build the basics of how to use cloud services both securely and efficiently. Then you will layer the most important factor on top: your people. Your people will use the framework to both increase their skills and collaborate with new (and sometimes scary) tools and technologies.

Conclusion

Now you have a plan for how to get your arms around this whole digital transformation. Next, we’ll dig deeper into your people and how to assess readiness for your team. You’ll learn about what to look for and how to know you’re all set for your cloud migration and for whatever technical projects you choose in the future.

Ready, Set…Cloud!

If you’d like a preview of what our blog series will cover in a more in-depth fashion, this guide is a great start. We share some best practices and insights gained from our experience helping many organizations on their journey to cloud success. Use it as a helpful reminder to stay on track.

The post Cloud Migration Series (Step 2 of 5): Start Planning appeared first on Cloud Academy.