In the first of a two part article, Lee Field, head of IT consulting and complex solutions (APAC) at Verizon, discusses cloud migration and best practice for adopting disruptive solutions to drive efficiency and resilience.
While many enterprise organizations and governments are adopting a ‘cloud-first’ approach for the deployment of new IT services and applications, very few are lucky enough to have a clean slate when it comes to deploying these workloads.
Unlike start-ups who, for the most part, have become ‘cloud native’ in their path from development to delivery, legacy application estates affect enterprise organizations in different ways. Migration strategies are now maturing beyond their nascent physical-to-virtual or virtual-to-virtual server migrations into a much more application-centric approach that is more relevant to cloud delivery models.
The increasing maturity of these migration strategies, combined with the desire to capitalize on the benefits from delivering cloud, is motivating IT leaders to consider how existing applications could be made cloud ready rather than embarking on an often costly and timely redevelopment.
Best Practices for Cloud Transition
Moving to a cloud environment doesn’t need to be difficult, but it does require smart planning. First, it is critical that the service catalog is up to date and accurate. The business criticality of each application needs to be understood, classified and added to the catalogue. Then risk profiling based upon the criticality of the application can be applied. We continue to spend a lot of time working with customers to classify criticality and risk then mapping these to services and readers will be surprised by some of our conclusions. Cloud isn’t always the answer and sometimes the best solution to meet the requirements is colocation and/or managed hosting.
Once the mapping of delivery models and services is complete, migration strategies should then be developed. These often vary, depending on the circumstances, from lift and drop migrations to software-assisted application virtualization methods.
Detailed test plans — particularly for integration, user acceptance and performance testing — need to be completed. Projects are frequently delayed at this stage due to resource and labor requirements for documenting and completing the testing.
Never forget it is about moving the application or workload — not the server.
In my next article, I will discuss the challenges faced by enterprise’s migrating legacy IT application to cloud solutions and the different security issues enterprises must consider when moving to a cloud-hosted system.
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