For a large-scale enterprise, moving to cloud is a long-drawn and complex procedure. It is like shifting an entire city, with the bulk of its streets, the little houses, shops that populate it and most importantly, to preserve how they are put together. Without a plan, the migration process could end up draining major human and technical resources of a company. In the recently held 2016 AWS re:Invent conference, one of the most extensively discussed topics was how companies could smoothly carry out a large-scale cloud migration. Picking up from Mario Thomas (professional from Amazon Web Services), here are the five significant cloud migration tips to till the ground for harvesting a high-performance migration on a large-scale.
1: How large-scale cloud are we talking about?
On AWS, the term large-scale generally denotes a movement of over hundreds of app-workloads/servers on an average. What are you looking for? How much of your server/workload do you intend to shift to the cloud?
2: Why are you shifting to the cloud?
Before you begin making an action plan, you need to have your digital goals in place. Most importantly, in accord with your business mission. A shift in the higher-level positions like the ownership of company could have triggered a change to the digital plans. Maybe a new compliance is in order. There could also be doubts about the capacities of in-house services, with regard to handling the services to a huge number of customers spread across different regions.
When you move to the cloud, a large chunk of your IT resources will open up to being involved in innovation. Other features of the cloud like its ability to offer large savings in the long-run and also to enhance elasticity of your company. Write the reason for shifting into cloud and make sure you keep this in mind while you build the cloud migration plan.
3: Make a list of requirements before moving into the cloud
Once you have managed to jot down the destination you wish to arrive at, imagine the ways in which moving to cloud would affect your company. The starting point would be to categorize the workloads according to the urgency to shift (time-line).
Once you have prepared a tentative time-line, clarify how many resources (technical and human) are ready to go cloud. This implies that you must have a backup plan in case there are any hiccups on the way.
Most importantly, you have to consider needs of the people belonging to your organization: your employees, customers and partners.
4: Is your company ready for the cloud migration?
An organization is migration-ready, in its initial stages, if it has clearly answered the following three questions:
- What are the workloads in your company?
- Which workloads do you have to move?
- What will be the time-order for such a movement?
When the above three questions have been answered, you will need to figure out the details of your migration plan. This will include the cost for migration and duration for the entire process. Along with each of these notes, you will have to brainstorm the effects it will have, on your employees and customers. Estimate how much savings you will be making by carrying out the migration. Also, write down the benefits to your business owing to the migration.
5: Has your organization developed enough?
After going through the core questions about migration, you must consider the most important one: has your company developed enough to go through migration? Make sure your organization undergoes a Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) to evaluate status of the resources and readiness.
The key points of data collection will include migration costs, people costs, infrastructure costs, third-party costs and application costs. Would the SLAs or OLAs alter with the migration?
A large-scale migration to the cloud is a long-term commitment to continually managing the resources of your company, readying them for receiving the upcoming changes and syncing the plan with business goals. Any company intending to carry out a migration must make sure it is adequately prepared for such a commitment!
We would love to hear from you. Share your tips and ideas for planning and executing a large-scale cloud migration. Contact us to know more about Suyati’s expertise in AWS as well as other cloud platforms.
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