As organizations move more applications to public cloud, cloud migration planning is integral to success and business outcomes.. Kim Weins, Vice President of Cloud Strategy at Flexera, a provider of IT management software highlights proven best practices for overcoming the top cloud migration challenges.
Cloud migration is accelerating and it’s challenging. With thorough cloud migration planning up front, those challenges are surmountable.
Findings from the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report underscore that more workloads are moving to public cloud and that 61% of respondents plan to focus on cloud migration in the coming year. Meanwhile, the current COVID-19 pandemic is driving up anticipated cloud usage, with 59% of enterprises now expecting cloud usage to exceed prior plans. As a result, creating a data-driven approach to cloud migration becomes even more critical.
Source: Flexera
The Report also identifies the top three cloud migration challenges as:
- Understanding app dependencies
- Assessing technical feasibility
- Assessing on-prem vs. cloud costs.
Here are the top 3 best practices to understand and mitigate these challenges and drive optimal business performance outcomes from the cloud migration:.
Source: Flexera
1. Map Business Services Accurately
When moving an application or business service to cloud, the first problem is getting visibility into the infrastructure and software components that make up the application. This can be difficult in the case of legacy applications, especially when the people who knew about them have moved on from your organization.
The second problem is made clear by asking the question, “When I move this application, what other interdependencies are impacted?†Consider a bank that moves its mobile banking app that clients use to check balances, transfer money, or make payments. Does that application rely on a shared reporting service or log collection software that’s also used by other business services? Without a clear view of dependencies between business services, organizations are left to migrate and see what breaks along the way—a risky approach.
Seeing what’s actually in the IT estate is difficult because of the many unknowns. Manual mapping exercises are nearly impossible in any environment of scale. Furthermore, a configuration management database (CMDB) isn’t sufficient. Though it can provide an application view, it’s often incomplete, out of date, and won’t identify dependencies between different business services to demonstrate the applications in the environment. This lack of accurate and current data can lead to stalled migrations that take years, fail, or are never completed.
To manage this mapping challenge, automate the mapping process through a bottom-up collection. The goal is to discover everything (including networking data) in your environment—not just the known applications. However, you need to go beyond traditional application dependency mapping tools, which fall short because of the manual effort needed to “clean up†the output of the tool. Consider using tools that leverage intelligent algorithms to provide an accurate, clean view of all of the components that support each business service and how the business services interact with each other (e.g., through an HR app or a banking app).
Also Read: Spiceworks IT Community Survey: Public Cloud Trends in 2019 and Beyond
2. Take a Holistic Approach to Your Technical Assessment
Although you may start your cloud migration effort by moving the easier apps, it’s helpful to start with a holistic technical assessment across all of your business services. The information gathered by a cloud migration assessment tool can reduce the effort needed to identify whether or not re-architecting is necessary. Most organizations will leverage both lift-and-shift and rearchitecting/modernization approaches. Identifying and understanding technical characteristics of a business service is important to help identify which apps to move and understand the level of effort. For example, if your data center runs low on available storage, you may want to move apps that require a lot of storage first in order to avoid purchasing additional capacity. Or perhaps you choose to move the applications that are near capacity on-prem and create performance bottlenecks.
Use an assessment scorecard to prioritize the order of migration to meet your organizational needs and to meet your long-term goals, such as cost reduction, business continuity, scalability, or agility. Look for the low-hanging fruit for a quick win, then build on it. (Will you start your migration plan with a 3-tier app that needs to be refactored or will you tackle something you can do in a day?) Your technical assessment may also identify which services could be moved to SaaS solutions.
Learn More: How to Build a Cloud Data ‘Restore and Recovery’ PlanOpens a new window
3. Optimize Costs as You Migrate
Cost efficiency/savings is the top metric used to measure cloud progress, as reported by 77% of respondents in the Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report. With nearly a third (30%) of cloud spend being wasted, 73% of respondents identified the need to optimize their existing use of cloud as a top cloud initiative for 2020. The need to optimize cloud spend is particularly urgent: cloud spend is estimated to grow by an average 47% next year, yet organizations struggle to accurately plan for cloud spend (exceeding their cloud budget by an average of 23% last year).
Source: Flexera
If you simply migrate apps with the same fixed allocation of CPU, memory, and storage as on-prem, then run them 24×7, you won’t save money. Instead, optimize as you migrate to the cloud, then make optimization a continuous practice to ensure your cloud spend is efficient.
There are five areas for cost-saving as you migrate:
- Find and eliminate zombie servers (those sitting idle or with low utilization) before you migrate. Not only will you avoid spinning up unneeded cloud infrastructure, but you can also reclaim licenses for software running on those servers. Evaluating which servers can be eliminated or consolidated (which asset management teams might not have questioned) can yield significant savings on cloud costs.
- Rightsize as you migrate. Many systems on-prem are over-provisioned. Track on-prem usage metrics (actual utilization of CPU, memory, storage, and bandwidth) over a period of a month or more to capture any weekly or monthly peaks. Avoid using the max or average utilization; instead, look at the 95th percentile-level utilization in order to properly size your cloud instances
- Compare cloud providers and cloud regions. On average, organizations use more than two public cloud providers. For each business service, look at the costs across the different cloud providers you use and assess which cloud region within your desired geography is most cost effective. The comparison also allows you to negotiate with a cloud provider for better discounts.
- Understand licensing implications. Understanding licensing costs in a rightsized environment can help uncover savings as well. Evaluate license rules that can drive your costs higher or lower. Some software vendors charge more to run their software in certain cloud providers; others may offer savings when you run their software in the cloud.
- Evaluate cloud provider discounts. Don’t lock into cloud provider discounts too early. Make sure your newly migrated workloads are performing well. Perform a thorough cost optimization assessment to ensure you select the right type and level of discounts. Make sure you’re rightsizing as you migrate so that you don’t lock in discounts on unoptimized spend.
Also Read: Why Cloud Cost Optimization MattersOpens a new window
Planning Makes Cloud Migration Manageable
As you undertake your top cloud initiatives, focusing on effective cloud migration planning can help ease and improve the process. Cloud migration can become more manageable as your organization matures and gains experience. No matter how far along you already are in your migration, taking these steps today can help ease your future cloud migration goals.
Learn More: Cloud Isn’t Always the Answer: Issues to Consider Before MigratingOpens a new window
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