Cloud Migration Part 1: An Overview

Cloud Migration Part One: An Overview

Business is all about efficiency and effectiveness.  In today’s world, however, those twin goals almost always lead to cloud migration.  This anecdotal observation is supported by Gartner which sees worldwide public cloud service revenue jumping to over $300B by 2021.

Independent research from Market and Markets echoes this expectation in its cloud migration services forecast which sees this market subset growing from $3.17B in 2017 to $9.47B by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 24.5%.  With migration being such a high priority activity, many organizations are looking for the most efficient and effective cloud migration strategy.

In addressing this query from thousands of customers worldwide, IBM Global Technology Services (GTS) has migrated applications in just about every industry.  These migrations have targeted global service providers like AWS and Azure, as well as regional and local ones.  The best practices GTS has honed through these experiences include:

• How to understand and classify business critical data;
• Executing an efficient process for screening and selecting applications for cloud migration;
• Following a methodology for discovering the most effective strategy for each application migration; and
•  Selection of the most cost-effective and industry aligned cloud service provider(s).

Experience has also shown that businesses are in different stages of their “Journey to the Cloud.”  These initial stages often include:

• Planning and designing common foundational infrastructure services;
• Pattern and Template based automated deployments for public clouds;
• Migrating workloads to the most appropriate cloud through a standardized, repeatable tool driven framework;
• Monitor and Manage workloads using standardized tools and process aligned to cloud platforms; and
• Governing, tracking, managing and optimizing cloud usage and spend.

These common best practices and initial stages are common to the most successful cloud migration projects.

This series, presented in four weekly installments, lays out the details of how leading organizations have transformed themselves through cloud migration and how GTS has embedded industry best practices into their hybrid cloud service delivery model.  “Part Two: Classifying Organizational Data,” covers the identification of key business processes and their associated data types.  The article also the outlines the importance of identifying process data owners and the required security controls for each data type.  “Part Three: Application Screening,” looks at determining the most appropriate target deployment environment, each application’s business benefit, key performance indicator options and target return on investment.  That segment also shows how to select the most appropriate migration strategy for each application.  “Part Four: Executing The Migration” presents experience informed guidance on how to effectively and efficiently execute a cloud application migration strategy.  This segment includes selecting the most appropriate cloud service provider and technology services, reviewing and verifying available data security controls and suggested steps for SLA negotiations.  It also addresses business/mission model alignment, organizational change management, and migration project planning.

The series also presents the three most common cloud adoption paths for business, namely:

• Innovation: Building cloud-native applications using the DevOps model;
• Agility: Modernizing and migrating legacy applications and infrastructure to a native cloud model; and
• Stability: Managing workloads and infrastructure in clouds and on premises

This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit ITBizAdvisor.

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