When the COVID pandemic hit, it felt as if the whole world had suddenly changed.
But in many cases, things didn’t really change. Rather, trends and shifts that were already taking place accelerated – fast. Ecommerce is a classic example. It grew steadily over the past decade, and then in 2020, it suddenly peaked.
The same can be seen with cloud migration. While enterprises were already on the move towards cloud-native infrastructure, nearly all the respondents in the 2020 Gartner Cloud End-User Buying Behavior Survey said that their organization was planning to maintain or increase their cloud computing spend in the coming year. Not just some respondents, but all!
This year, the increased need for online collaboration, virtual accessibility and centralized mobility in the workplace has turned cloud migration into a necessity for business continuity. Organizations know it, so the pressing question is not “if” but “how”.
In order to be ready for tomorrow’s cloud migration, organizations must start planning now to ensure a streamlined, successful and cost-efficient process. Every migration to AWS is unique, but whether it’s 50 or 5,000 servers, there are three aspects that must be considered in advance. Let’s take a look:
1. Executive buy-in
Cloud migration is a fundamental shift that affects the way that everyone in the organization conducts business, whether they are technical professionals or not. The management team must be on board early to support the migration process, to help avoid roadblocks later on and ensure a smooth transition to cloud adoption. To this end, many organizations establish a CCoE (Cloud Center of Excellence), a cross-functional team of “Change Agents” appointed for their knowledge and skills to develop and manage an effective cloud strategy and prevent “silo-ing”. The CCoE method is very effective in getting management and the outer core involved, trained and fully supportive as a part of the cloud transformation.
2. Plan beyond lift and shift
Migrating 1:1, or “rehosting”, may seem like the simplest and fastest way to get all the company’s assets and applications up and running on the cloud. However, this method is not cloud-native and may lead to more problems down the road.
There are many approaches to cloud migration, and no right or wrong way. So organizations should work on mapping a migration plan that makes the most sense for their business needs.
Sometimes, a small optimization for the cloud (ie. replatforming) is the right way. Retire and retain are additional methods, where organizations look at what is no longer needed or has been covered with the refactoring of the environment and retiring it, or adopting a phased approach, keeping some IT assets on-premise until they are migration ready. Most organizations do find that they need a hybrid-cloud approach, even just as a temporary setup. The point is, there are myriad ways to migrate to the cloud beyond lift and shift – the key is knowing which approach is best for your IT assets and developing a strategic and phased migration roadmap that ensures success at every stage.
3. Choose an AWS Migration Competency Partner
When deciding to invest in cloud migration, it is wise to leverage an experienced AWS partner to plan and execute the migration. Taking advantage of AWS experts with the background and skills to develop the precise strategy that is right for an organization greatly reduces risk, helps avoid falling into common traps, enables better understanding of TCO, optimizes timelines and budgets, and ensures the migration is executed according to the latest cloud-native best practices. There’s another advantage to having a migration partner: creating a clear roadmap to cloud adoption will help gain the trust of your stakeholders, removing any blocks to executive buy-in you may still be struggling with.
If you’re considering AWS cloud migration, the time to start planning is now. Next on our blog, we’ll look closer at how to successfully execute a cloud migration roadmap and the benefits of operating on the AWS cloud (which you’ll quickly discover when you are up and running). Stay tuned!