Moving to the cloud is unlike just any technology project, and realizing the benefits of cloud adoption requires a business to first conduct a thorough cloud discovery and assessment. Each assessment and discovery will vary according to the different business case. The people and organizational change aspects are overlooked many times, and it is the most important factor in determining value for cloud adoption.
This is why it is important to discuss the people related and organizational related considerations when trying to implement cloud migration. It is always beneficial to cover some organizational challenges and strategies that you need to address them. Apart from that, you will also have to look towards typical organizational structures as companies evolve their cloud migration strategies.
Organizational Change
Change is often a difficult endeavor to accomplish. Humans are naturally hardwired to not spend any energy on change, and cloud migration suggestions are often met with fear and uncertainty. This fear often stems from a lack of cloud discovery and assessment.
It pertains to concerns around the perceived additional workloads, failure to adopt new methods, job losses, safety of organization, and ambiguity of roles. To get a good idea of the organizational change, you need to build a business case as part of an evaluation effort.
Principles of Carrying out a Cloud Migration Assessment
When assessing cloud migration options, businesses need to make sure that they are trying to solve the right problem. Most businesses will seek cloud migration because they will have to deal with some overarching challenge or problem that is at the core of each business case.
Your company may want new business capabilities or the ability to bring products to the market faster. Whatever the business case is, you need it to be thorough and covers all perspective. This may seem very obvious, but all businesses have biases and blind spots that cause them to miss out on important details.
Surging Cloud Adoption
The adoption of cloud services are on the rise, and as organizations look for a more flexible way to improve processes and efficiency. However, as deployment of cloud services soar, managing the cloud ecosystem becomes a challenge for businesses. A hybrid IT landscape is one that combines cloud services with conventional IT operations.
This is why it is best for businesses to sign up with third party platforms that offer a comprehensive framework which allows business leaders the freedom to adopt cloud services they need. On the other hand, third-party services also help businesses deploy IT management that ensures the correct application of governance and IT policy within the hybrid IT system.
Cloud Services Management and Migration
When going through the migration stage companies need to understand that they will move from their legacy data centers to the cloud. There is no process or framework that applies to each business, which is why carrying out cloud discovery and business evaluation is critical. This is not to say that there are no best practices and solutions that businesses can use to ease the migration process. Cloud migration involves the combining process, people and technology.
Assessment for Migration
The assessment process for migration starts with evaluating your business needs and figuring out the gaps that cloud migration will fill. This will involve the act of application and portfolio management to identify and find out about the application that you will start to migrate from.
Once portfolio management and applications needed is identified, businesses will have to seek out the technical requirements that can support that application. Technical components that need to be addressed have to come with validation so that it lives up to the business standards. Lastly, you will have to focus on really driving operations to optimize the performance.
Third-party cloud providers can help you identify the applications which your business can utilize and implement. Another major process of cloud migration is to bring your application to the cloud. One of the methods of doing this is to bring your application from the data center to the cloud. The second option requires you to re-platform which requires you build the entire application on the cloud from scratch.
The third option is to re-purchase your solution, in which you can simply buy a new solution from a provider. Third party providers will also help you make minor tweaks and changes to the solution so that they can bring it into the cloud in a more-or-less run rate business. These options vary in length and complexity, and each solution differs.
Migration Strategy You Must Implement
The key to a good migration is to plan ahead and make the right assessment so you do not have to face unnecessary headache for your organization. You need to have technology, operations and workers aligned to carry forth a successful migration. This involves making a successful business case that articulates how your business will be moving into the cloud.
Moreover, assessment also helps you discover how much you are expecting to spend on migration strategies, along with how much you are willing to invest on capital and tools for migration. You also need to deploy the right skill-set in your business that will be compatible with the cloud.
One of the things that people recommend is that organizations build a concept that allows governance to take place. You also need to emphasize the component of operational optimization since moving the application into the cloud is not enough. Once it is there, you need to realize the benefits of moving into the cloud and this will only happen through provisioning the solution.
Get Cloud Discovery and Assessment Solutions
The discovery and assessment allows business to realize their migration potential by evaluating their current skill and inventory. Allowing VAST to provide you with the discovery and assessment strategy helps make the migration cost-effective, efficient and risk-free. Simply by downloading our guide, you can understand what it will take for your business to benefit from cloud migration. It will also help you find out whether you should move to a public, hybrid or private cloud.
