Whether you’re managing a decade’s worth of legacy IT or building a tech stack from the ground up, the cloud is most likely in your future—if you’re not there already. According to IDC, companies that migrate to the cloud see a 76% reduction in unplanned downtime and a 40% reduction in IT infrastructure costs.
Still on the fence about making the move or not sure where to begin? Start by answering the four questions below and get insights from two Amazon Web Services (AWS) experts—Philip Potloff, head of Enterprise Strategy, and Murat Yanar, director of Migration Workloads within AWS’s Worldwide Specialist Organization. They’ll help you chart your organization's strongest path to the cloud and give you ideas on how to migrate successfully.
01
Is your organization’s primary cloud migration hurdle tactical or cultural?
Tactical
We don’t have the
know-how or infrastructure to move to the cloud.
Potloff says leaders typically perceive three primary tactical challenges to migration. The first is a lack of necessary IT talent at their organizations. The next is that certain functions, like order processing for example, can seem too critical to disrupt. Finally, an on-premises system might appear sufficient: “If it’s running perfectly fine, why move it?”
There are several compelling reasons for migrating, including better resiliency, less gear to manage and ultimately more efficient operations. So, if you find any of these tactical challenges daunting, Potloff advises making the move incrementally. “The cloud offers a lot of flexibility so you can be opportunistic and strategic with regard to which workloads you move into the cloud,” he says.
Cultural
Our people don’t understand
the cloud’s benefits, so they’re not ready to make a move.
Hesitancy can take many forms—concerns over the cloud’s performance or worries about taking on new responsibilities.
If that sounds like your workforce, focus on building what Yanar calls a “culture for change” by doing the following four things. First, ensure senior leadership is aligned and truly committed to migrating to the cloud, setting clear direction and expectations and making the move a priority. Second, set an aggressive top-down goal that forces the organization to move faster than it would have organically. Third, get trained on the cloud; AWS trains hundreds of thousands of people every year. And fourth, conduct an application portfolio analysis and build a plan for what to move to the cloud in the short-, medium- and long-term. Sometimes organizations can become paralyzed if they can’t figure out how to move every last workload, but there is no need to boil the ocean.
02
Is it important to your organization that some of your IT operations remain on premises?
Yes
We’ve made significant investments in our technology, and there’s no reason to leave it behind.
There’s an outdated assumption that cloud migration is an all-or-nothing proposition. In fact, hybrid cloud environments are common, says Potloff.
“There’s no such thing as black-and-white,” he explains. “For the vast majority of organizations, it makes perfect sense to create environments where you can leverage the same tooling, the same infrastructure and the same capabilities between two locations: on premises and in the cloud.”
Here, the joint VMware/AWS product suite may be the right solution. “Our customers have the flexibility to run their workloads either in the cloud—with VMware Cloud™ on AWS—to benefit from the availability and scalability of the AWS Cloud, or, on premises with VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. This solution is best for workloads that need to meet low latency, local data processing or data residency requirements,” explains Potloff.
No
We are ready, willing and
eager to move everything
to the cloud.
For many organizations, running day-to-day IT entirely in the cloud offers clear benefits.
“The cloud allows customers to innovate faster because they can focus their highly valuable IT resources on developing applications that differentiate their business and transform customer experiences instead of the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing infrastructure and data centers,” Yanar says.
Potloff agrees, adding that a cloud migration “removes the headache of building, operating and managing a data center while also ensuring that users have all the capacity and IT support they
need to deploy their application workloads across the globe.”
By Jeff Koyen