Cloud Migration: the secret to success is asking the right questions

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Rudyard Kipling, in the poem accompanying the short story "The Elephant's Child", recalls the six zealous servants, the six honest servants who taught him everything he knows: their names are What, Why, When, How, Where and Who. The same questions are the ones a company should ask itself when it decides to face Cloud Migration.

I keep six honest serving-men 
(They taught me all I knew); 
Their names are What and Why and When 
And How and Where and Who.

Migrating to the Cloud is an iterative process, evolving as the organisation develops new skills, processes, tools and capabilities. It requires a phased approach, which includes:

  • Assessment

  • Preparation

  • Planning

  • Execution

  • Migration governance

An approach in which each stage prepares the next.

Having identified the expected benefits and objectives about cloud migration, the question moves to how to manage this process. Returning to Kipling, after answering the first two questions "What?" (cloud migration) and "Why?" (the benefits it brings in terms of economics, operational agility and business scalability) the other questions is: "When and How and Where and Who".

Cloud Migration: ask the right questions

As in other areas of personal and professional life, when faced with change, the Cloud is not just a technological factor, starting on the right foot means asking the right questions. In fact, a list of questions provides a good guide, just like the guides we use to explore an area, plan a trip and get directions, step by step, on how to get to our destination. Beta 80 Group's teams adopt a structured approach, in order to accompany customers along the Cloud Transformation journey, created thanks to the very contribution of the customers and partners we work with (AWS, Microsoft).

Here are the questions our customers used to ask us and from which we started to create our framework to drive the Cloud Transformation:

  • How do I create the right business case for Cloud migration?

  • How can I accurately assess my environment, current infrastructure and applications?

  • What are the current on-premise risks and limitations?

  • What are the current skills and responsibilities of the internal team?

  • How do I create a migration plan?

  • How to identify and evaluate the right partners who can help me?

  • How to estimate the cost of cloud migration?

  • How long does it take to complete the migration process?

  • What tools and skills are needed to perform the migration?

  • How can old applications be managed? Can they be optimised and become more scalable?

Beta 80's Cloud Readiness Assessment answers these questions, carried out both through interviews and analysis of the documentation provided by the client, and through automatic data collection tools.

The result is an organisational mapping of the processes and costs sustained for the IT infrastructure, the definition of a migration strategy, the highlighting of possible risks and critical factors, and an estimate of the time and investment needed for migration.

From the migration of small single applications to entire data centres with hundreds of applications, experience in working with customers tells us that it is the initial migrations that build confidence and momentum, accelerating the migration of other workloads in the future and decreeing the success of a migration project. During the assesment, the first workload is identified, non-critical and with measurable impacts. Its stakeholders will be pioneers in initiating the Cloud Transformation process.

In Cloud Computing, migration is only the start of a journey.

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