What’s Missing from Your Cloud Migration Plan? Team Alignment

Who owns the cloud migration plan in your organization? You would presume it’s the role of the IT team. After all, they are responsible for capturing migration requirements, building the strategy, defining the IT architecture, deciding what applications and infrastructure will move and where as well as planning the migration steps.

But if your company is to succeed at migration planning and execution, the responsibility and decision making must be shared across a broader group. Not only must both business and IT align around corporate objectives, they’ve got to share an integrated view of everything that’s on the table for potential migration.

With this common view, they can all see where the relevant applications connect and are inter-dependent, make decisions based upon the overall company goals, and be able to see what might move together and where there are opportunities for efficiency.

Case Study: Accelerating the Cloud Journey for a Global Financial Services Firm

TDS recently worked closely with the IT team at a global financial services firm to help them engineer a solution that would improve their visibility and build the foundation for a scalable cloud migration process. The organization’s cloud migration plans had been moving at a snail’s pace, with poor communication and countless meetings and emails to try to exchange information and move things forward. They came to TDS to see if a better approach and use of the TDS orchestration tool, TransitionManager, would allow them to accelerate their pace, reduce cost and scale for the future.

A Complete View of the Cloud Migration Plan

Working with the client’s IT, business and project management teams, TDS analyzed their current application environment, with its dispersed set of applications and servers. TDS’s enterprise architects and migration experts worked with the IT team to discover, analyze and plan a cloud migration for a subset of their IT environment. Information was ingested from a variety of sources into TransitionManager and then normalized to filter out noise and build a single, consistent source of truth. Data and application dependencies were quickly validated with subject matter experts and, much to the surprise of the client, revealed critical information gaps about missing key applications and dependencies.

With a complete view of application and device dependencies, the team was able to quickly determine which groups of applications can be or should be migrated, which should be potentially retired, and which could be bundled together. Rather than make decisions and set up the migration plans so that things were organized and migrated serially, with all the decision makers sharing a common view, they could economize their efforts and build an efficient plan. This information was then used to develop a customized migration workstream and then fed into creating an auto-generated, step-by-step plan known as a “runbook.”

The customer was able to quickly see how the process using TransitionManager was their fast track to the cloud. They were able to see the following benefits:

• Less meeting time required for discovery
• Improved communication, collaboration and task coordination
• Reduced inefficiencies
• Reduced risk of outages caused by missing or inaccurate information buried in spreadsheets
• Quicker conflict resolution and decision making with dynamic views

Taking on transformation initiatives, whether they be cloud migrations, data center consolidations or relocations, application refactoring or retiring old technology, requires that all relevant teams work together. And the results prove it out: Enterprises function better, make more profit, and generate better ROI because they hit their goals with less effort. And while there may be no standard way to align successfully, an organization where IT and business teams are in lock-step can improve agility and operational efficiencies.

Read next: Removing the Barriers to Cloud Adoption

Need to accelerate your progress? Watch this 30 minute discussion to learn how to create an adoption plan that aligns IT with the business strategy and helps you to get there faster–without downtime–using TransitionManager.

Strategies for Faster Cloud Adoption in 2020