How to Get Your Cloud Migration Plan Out of Second Gear

More and more organizations are eager to tap into the huge business benefits to moving to the cloud, but often get stuck along the way.

Here we’ve outlined one example of how a large financial organization began their journey to the cloud but soon ran up against common roadblocks, including the project not moving fast enough.

How they addressed their challenges can help your IT organization get your migration project back on track:

The Problem: Cloud Project Stalls

This organization’s cloud migration plans had been moving at a snail’s pace, with poor communication and lack of progress, despite the countless meetings and emails to try to exchange information and move things forward.

• Plans had been laid out, reviewed, analyzed and re-reviewed
• Countless meetings were held, giving white boards a real workout
• Emails were flying back and forth to iterate and comment on the plans
• Multiple, complex spreadsheets were being swapped back and forth

Despite all this activity, it was becoming increasingly apparent that they were spinning their wheels. They couldn’t get their plan off the ground. It was difficult to get the right folks to collaborate and make sure all the data was being captured correctly.

And worst of all, they had the distinct fear that some critical application interdependencies were going to get missed, causing an outage that would impact business services.

Biggest Challenges Moving to the Cloud

The IT leaders at this organization were forced to confront common challenges when moving to the cloud including:

• Too much time required for discovery
• Poor communication, collaboration and task coordination
• Increased risk of outages caused by missing or inaccurate information buried in spreadsheets
• Difficulty with conflict resolution and decision making
• Lack of visibility for task owners, status, and progress, ensuring accountability

How They Got Their Cloud Migration Plan Back on Track

Here are the steps this financial organization took to solve these challenges and get their cloud migration back on track:

1. Information was ingested into a central platform from a variety of sources and then normalized to filter out noise and build a single, consistent source of truth.
2. Data and application dependencies were quickly validated and, much to the surprise of the client, revealed critical information gaps about key applications and dependencies. Identification of these gaps early in the process eliminated prolonged decision making down the road and unnecessary meetings which could have delayed the project.
3. This information was then used to develop a customized migration workstream and create an auto-generated, step-by-step plan known as a “runbook.” These runbooks would establish a repeatable cloud migration process, leveraging automation to ensure efficiency and adaption of a standardized approach.
4. The IT team then had a centralized platform for analyzing, planning and monitoring the migration plan, tasks and progress

The results were clear:

1. They improved efficiency and accuracy by eliminating countless spreadsheets and unnecessary team meetings
2. They reduced the risk of incomplete migration groups (dependencies left behind)
3. The risk of poor user experience was reduced (incomplete migration groups introduce latency issues)
4. SME time needed to review and update critical data was reduced by presenting them with pre-populated reviews from consolidated data.

For more information, read the full case study here.