Many enterprises are looking for flexibility in their cloud strategy. Instead of solely relying on building and maintaining their own technology infrastructure, they want to have the ability to leverage innovations from external clouds while ensuring security and control demanded by their policies and guidelines. This is presently driving the cloud migration initiatives among several enterprises.
Before embarking on the cloud migration implementation, the following questions must be effectively answered:
- What applications do we have and what are their dependencies? Is the information accurate, complete and up-to-date?
- What enterprise support services (IAM, ticketing, logging, management etc.) are required by the applications?
- What infrastructure configuration is needed to support the applications?
- What is the benchmark data which we can use to compare pre and post scenarios? Benchmark data should cover multiple dimensions i.e. cost, performance, security, compliance etc., and should be able to tell how well the application is delivering the business objectives and outcomes.
- What application should be migrated, in which order, and by what time?
- Do we have the ability to track the migration process against set goals?
- Do we have the ability to measure the applications against the set benchmarks post migration?
- Do we have the ability to enforce policies, compliance, monitor and manage applications post migration centrally?
By doing the pre-requisite work to find answers to the above questions and creating the capabilities required to fill any gaps, enterprises can be sure of implementing their cloud migration strategy successfully.
The actual migration can be performed by the tools of their choice either provided by the cloud providers or with the help of implementation partners. But unless post migration capabilities are put in place, enterprises will not be able to assure that the migration is delivering the business objectives and outcomes.
