Strategies to help successfully migrate to cloud

Everyone is talking about cloud

For organizations, the imperative to move to cloud has only accelerated since the Covid-19 pandemic. The elasticity of cloud capabilities enables organizational systems to be resilient, agile, adaptable and scalable.

A post-pandemic world defined by high demand for remote work, e-commerce, and virtual learning among other fundamental shifts in consumer demand makes it obligatory for companies to accelerate their journey into the cloud.

Indeed, there is widespread acknowledgment of the promise that cloud brings. For example, in a 2019 survey of more than 200 c-suite leaders of large organizations conducted by the Everest Group1, more than 90% suggest that they have adopted cloud in some form, and adoption is accelerating because of high expectations around increased business agility. In contrast, another survey conducted by astarted found that two-thirds of companies that moved into the cloud are failing to fully realize their expected outcomes. Often, a key reason for this is that many companies do not spend enough time planning the migration.

At the other end of the spectrum are companies that spend too much time on planning, leading to analysis-paralysis and no action. What is needed is an ‘executable’ migration plan that has a long-term view but that can be implemented in the short-term. What is not helping is that technology leaders are getting bombarded by conflicting messages on the migration plan do you lift and shift, migrate and transform, transform and migrate or do you rip everything and start from scratch?

One thing is for sure, large enterprises recognize cloud as the future of enterprise IT and are actively moving on from proofs of concept and small, non-production cloud experiments to production migrations at scale. A recent Logic Monitor study suggests that by 2025, as many as 95% of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud. Cloud migration is a complex, time consuming, resource intensive exercise that might be easy to understand but hard to implement so treating it as just another IT project means missing the point. It is imperative on companies to spend adequate time on crafting a cloud migration strategy that helps reduce the gap between benefits expectation and realization.

A cloud migration strategy cannot be developed in isolation. It needs to take into consideration the company’s most critical business objectives whilst balancing short-term budgets with medium- and long-term rewards. Initial assessments can help formulate a conceptual strategy that is based on a weighted preference for different migration paths. For example, migration techniques will need to be rated for the cost savings they generate against other factors like application complexity, licensing and regulatory requirements. These choices will vary depending on a company’s specific business circumstances. In this paper we provide a holistic perspective on how a company can assess and weigh options based on business scenarios and create a tailored cloud migration strategy that helps them maximize value from their investments.