Cloud Migration and Transformation: The Start of the Cloud Journey
Written by Rebecca Huber, Hasibe Göçülü, and Clea Zolotow.
Introduction
It is a challenging task to migrate and transform existing workloads into the cloud, especially those requiring the higher standardization of managed services. Transition and Transformation is an integral part of cloud services, and creating a repeatable, reusable, factory model for a customer ensures a successful cloud migration.
The Cloud Journey
The cloud journey starts with building a private cloud or signing up for a public cloud offering. Cloud offers many opportunities and advantages for enterprise customers, hidden with the challenges of migrating existing workload into the cloud.
Migrating the current workload comprises most the workload when a large enterprise adopts cloud while new, greenfield, developments (i.e., born in the cloud) are usually in a separate initiative. Managed cloud services, such as IBM Services for Cloud Management offers a menu of standard services and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). These managed-services have additional requirements and constraints or migrations, compared to an unmanaged cloud environment.
Managed Services
Customers that need resilient infrastructure, a proven enterprise operating model, on-going optimization and day to day infrastructure management or have stringent security compliance requirements will gain the most benefit from managed services. With managed services, the vendor will build and manage the infrastructure including Operating System (OS) management, storage, network, patching, backup, security, and compliance with SLAs by implementing best practises to maintain the infrastructure and reduce the operational risks.
One of the reasons customers desire the capabilities of a fully managed service that this capability relieves them from the management responsibility, allowing clients more time to focus on their applications, core business and innovation. Given that many large IT shops do not keep up with even minimally required care of key IT components such as OS and security compliance, managed services are necessary to uphold business compliance and reduce operational risk.
Application owners are often under pressure to provide business functionality and often defer or ignore the maintenance updates and upgrades, as long as things are still working. Additionally, some customers are more advanced than others in the implementation of ITIL compliant service management. This is another benefit as you have the option not only to leverage the infrastructure provided by cloud, but managed offerings allow the client to continue to move up the capability stack of managed services and improve operation capabilities in many areas. In other words, the more advanced the client is the more they benefit from advanced ITIL capabilities while less advanced clients can take advantage of the move to cloud for operations transformation to heighten ITIL compliance.
Hybrid Cloud Environment
Some customers will opt for a hybrid environment, utilizing IBM Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure and/or Alibaba utilizing IBM’s Multi-Cloud Management Services (MCMS), the cloud-agnostic management for hybrid cloud ecosystems. The goal for many customers includes providing remote managed operations, shared services, and regional services for data center services to reduce business operational risks related to Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity Program (BCP) capabilities.
Cloud can also enable business growth through the usage of common shared services via the service catalog, thereby providing increased operational effectiveness and efficiency across the hybrid cloud. Cloud services are characterized by secure multitenant services, standardization and cloud features such as auto-provisioning and metered chargeback. They include services for virtual and physical servers, selected databases and middleware, and a few application services as defined by the service catalog, and orderable through a common services portal. Migration is a key phase in transforming from the traditional IT into a public or private and managed or non-managed cloud. The task of migration includes moving applications to a cloud environment that can be shared or dedicated, and on-premise (thus not requiring a lot of physical movement) or off premise (requiring a larger transition).
Engaging the Enterprise
A migration to cloud must bring benefits to the application owners not just by reducing the cost after the migration but also by leveraing standardized cloud offerings whileminimizing resource and downtime impact during migration. . As with any large, complex project, the enterprisemust build momentum and engage all stakeholders to make this change of IT delivery model across all business units.
Conclusion
Here, we’ve provided some of the reasons why enterprises move to cloud and explained why larger enterprises adopt a standardized, hybrid cloud managed service. Stay tuned as we delve deeper into migration and transformation technical details and planning!
