We all know by now that data center migrations are complex, high-risk projects–not everyday activities. Most IT organizations lack resources with the necessary expertise or even experience in migrations. We have found that organizations face these same challenges when confronted with a cloud migration, whether they are just beginning or are under pressure to accelerate their journey to the cloud.
These difficulties may be surprising since the buzz around moving to the cloud is ubiquitous. Teams are intent upon migrating workloads, spinning up environments to test new technology, and leveraging SaaS offerings throughout the enterprise. And with the plethora of tools and automated services that cloud platform providers make available to customers, you’d think that the path to the cloud wouldn’t be as daunting, error prone or high risk.
Yet, a recent survey by Aptum indicates that 62% of respondents find that the complexity and abundance of choice in cloud offerings has actually complicated their efforts when planning a cloud transformation.
As another indication of the difficulties, once organizations do get their cloud migration started, many are struggling to make good decisions . In a recent blog, we looked at some of the drivers behind the fact that 72% of organizations that have repatriated applications and workloads back from the cloud.
So where are organizations going wrong when planning and executing their cloud migration strategy? Here are some common issues that cause cloud migrations to fall short:
• Applications should have remained on-prem.
• Cost – not realizing expected savings, and often finding it more expensive than on-prem
• Technical challenges when provisioning resources
• Application performance issues
• Choosing the wrong public cloud provider
What can they do to make better decisions?
Here are steps we recommend to our enterprise customers around the globe:
In that same Aptum survey, 69% of organizations indicated that they want to accelerate their cloud deployments but they realize they need help. The first step to success is being aware of what you don’t know. That’s why it’s encouraging to learn that while most organizations want to accelerate their cloud deployments, they also realize they need help. This puts them on the right track to source the expertise they need and ask the questions that will take their cloud transformation projects to the next level.
Getting cloud right the first time for your organization requires a holistic understanding of your applications and infrastructure, and having a strategic roadmap for both. Virtana CTO, John Gentry recommends aligning applications and workloads to a specific cloud type, stating that “different workloads correspond to different layers of the business.”
TDS practitioners are experts at managing the most complex cloud migrations. We begin with insight to understand what you have and how everything works together. Our team takes these basic steps to build a solid foundation for decision making that enables us to help customers and partners reduce risk and make the right choice the first time.
We just put together an ebook with guidance on how to succeed at these tricky projects and have included some benchmarks for doing so with more efficiency, less risk and reduced costs.
Download your copy and learn about our secrets to success here.