Cloud opportunity
In recent years, global business has witnessed significant cloud adoption, which provides considerable value over traditional datacenters— achieving greater scalability, cost efficiency, and improved performance.
Many organizations now want to quickly take advantage of the benefits of the cloud by migrating their existing applications and workloads. However, cloud migration requires careful planning and strategy.
To enable successful migration, it’s important to have a strong plan in place that covers the end cloud environment, training, and—most importantly—the readiness of your workloads and applications.
This means you need to determine how to:
- Create the initial technical plans and business justification
- Ensure your workloads will run as expected.
- Perform the migration with limited impact to the business
Then, once you’ve migrated to the cloud, you need to make the most of your investment and keep it secure. If you’re an IT manager running on-premises applications and servers, this guide can help you start your migration to the cloud.
Migrating to the cloud doesn’t have to be difficult. With the right tools and processes, your migration project can be fast and friction free. Methods such
as lift and shift can rapidly move you to the cloud, reducing costs immediately and allowing you to focus on future cloud modernization. In addition, processes for assessment, optimization, security, and management can help throughout your continuing adoption of cloud resources
What are the triggers for migrating to Cloud?
At first glance, migration might seem like a technical decision, but its core is business related. Ultimately, it raises two fundamental questions: What’s driving your business to migrate to the cloud, and why now?
The benefits of the cloud are universal—reduction in running costs, faster modernization capabilities, and increased security. But there’s usually a specific catalyst for starting the migration discussion. These can include:
1.Operational efficiencies and reduced operating expenses
With reduced hardware support, increased manageability, and more efficient processes, you can save an average of 20 to 30 percent on VM resource configuration alone.
2. Decreased time to market/release
By reducing management overhead and freeing up budget, you can focus more time and effort on rapid software and solution development. Faster deployment of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) platforms enables your business to release faster
and more often.
3. Support for cost-effective scalability requirements
When you plan for peak usage through on-premises systems, your servers are usually running at less than 20 percent utilization. The cloud releases you from this model, enabling a scale-when-you-need-it approach.
4. Renewal of datacenter or hardware leasing
If you’re currently extending your budget on renewing hardware or paying for datacenter locations, it’s a good time to consider cloud migration. A cloud vendor can host these services for you, eliminating the need for costly leasing.
5. Renewal of licensing
Nearly all companies have an annual licensing agreement with their major IT providers. These require ample budget to ensure the OS platform
and virtualization are sufficiently covered. The cloud can help here as well, providing a pay-as-you-go offering to reduce this cost.
6. Application development and modernization
Two common challenges for today’s businesses are over allocated IT resources and on-premises platforms that limit the adoption of modern services. The cloud provides an integrated platform for modern development that enables teams to increase speed by up to 33 percent.
7. Software end of support
End of support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 means the end of regular security updates. This can be an opportunity to migrate your end-of-support workloads to Azure to strengthen your organizational security posture and ensure compliance across your hybrid environment.
Ultimately, by migrating your current environment to the cloud, you’re putting yourself in a better position to accelerate your business. By reducing costs and making management more efficient, a cloud platform can immediately influence your IT group’s ability to invest back into core strategic projects, increasing security and reliability while advancing application development.
