Best Practices for Migrating to the Cloud
According to Gartner, “through 2022, insufficient cloud IaaS skills will delay half of enterprise IT organizations’ migration to the cloud by two years or more.” In Technology Land, two years is a significant amount of time, particularly when the benefits of cloud are nearly immediate and will continue to accrue over time. Can your organization delay agility, cost reduction, reliability, and other benefits because of lack of cloud IaaS skills?
Gartner describes five cloud migration strategies—Rehost, Revise, Rearchitect, Rebuild, and Replace—involving some combination of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS).
The first, Re-hosting, or “lift and shift,” involves moving an on-premise workload to IaaS as is. While this path is clearly a fast and low-cost way to move an application to the cloud, there are trade-offs: higher operational costs over the long term and the inability for IT teams to develop native cloud skills.
At the other end of the Gartner spectrum is Replace, or completely replacing the application with a SaaS-based service.
DYI, expensive consultant, or…?
While the migration strategy you choose will depend on your goals, how you get there will depend on your willingness to invest time and money and accept risk. You could choose to go it alone. Or find an expensive consultant. Or take the “just-right” option.
- Do it yourself – While offering a great opportunity for IT teams to learn the cloud ropes, this approach requires a significant investment in time and acceptance of risk. Plus, most organizations don’t have IT people on staff with time on their hands.
- Hire a consultant – Hiring an expert consultant is an excellent option—if your budget allows for it. It’s a big investment in time and money, but much lower risk and less time for your team.
- Invest in “just-right” – Logicalis Production Ready Cloud delivers a pre-configured environment within Microsoft Azure where all the configuration, risk and security issues have already been solved. You can safely and cost effectively move your workload within days or weeks.
Listen to the “Best Practices for Migrating to the Cloud” webinar to hear Logicalis and Cisco cloud experts discuss cloud migrations in greater detail. Or schedule a complimentary workshop with our cloud subject matter experts and we can show you how we can make the cloud work for you.
Tony Fischer is the Dir of Business Development at Logicalis Inc.