If your IT organization thinks that migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud is just a lift-and-shift operation, they will be in for a surprise. What makes the cloud so appealing over on-premises is its ability to scale, provision resources on-demand and respond to changes in workload and utilization via its elastic capabilities. Getting there requires a heavy amount of planning, forecasting and reconfiguring of infrastructure and services to utilize the cloud without encountering any nasty financial surprises.
To fully harness all that the cloud has to offer, IT organizations must shift their mindset on resourcing, operations, efficiency and how to properly pay for and report on compute, storage, databases, network transfer and more at scale. Organizations that fail to do so experience significant overages and costs that far outweigh what might have been originally planned before migration. Not taking advantage of newer technologies such as containers and vendor discounts like AWS Reserved Instances can lead to opportunity costs, lost efficiency and savings “left on the table.”
On the bright side, there are key questions and steps that any business or enterprise can take to prepare its IT organization for a successful cloud migration. We’ve outlined a few below.
Consider These Key Questions
Before embarking on a cloud migration, there are a handful of key questions that IT organizations must ask their management, colleagues and peers.
- Does your IT organization have a cloud migration strategy in place?
- Who will keep track of cloud utilization and costs and does your IT organization have the platform to do this at scale with minimal to no mistakes?
- How will your IT organization track and optimize key cloud vendor discount levers such as AWS Reserved Instances and their many complexities?
- Are there modern cloud-focused governance models in place to ensure cloud utilization compliance and transparency in spending and chargeback?
- How does your IT organization forecast for cloud spend in the short and long term?
These five questions encompass a foundational start for any modern cloud migration strategy. Answering them with all the IT teams involved and getting everyone following the same cohesive, well-communicated strategy is a key first step before any code is compiled or cloud resource is spun up.
Cloud Migration Is a Job for Everyone: Let’s Begin
Whether you’re a CTO or CIO leading the charge toward achieving the all-in-on-cloud vision, or the directors and IT practitioners carrying out the expert moves to migrate systems, everyone plays a certain part. Our cloud migration experts have created two key guides for Cloud Leaders and Cloud Practitioners to review key principles on successful cloud migrations.
The next step: take action. Once everyone’s on the same page and the vision is set, build that strategy to begin the journey to the cloud. If your IT teams need a push in the right direction, get in touch with our Cloud Financial Strategy Office for some best practices or to learn real examples from the thousands of global business and enterprise customers whom we help daily.
