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Tag: cloud migration

  • 5 Steps to a Seamless Multi-Cloud Migration

    5 Steps to a Seamless Multi-Cloud Migration

    With digitization the topic of discussion in almost every boardroom since the onset of COVID-19, it’s no coincidence that migration to the cloud has skyrocketed in tandem. In fact, at the onset of the pandemic, 87% of IT decision-makers noted that the remote restructuring of the workplace would push their organizations to accelerate cloud migrations.

    That trend shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, Gartner predicts that cloud spending will increase by 23% in 2021 to reach $332B. Driving this historic shift is the adoption of multi-cloud infrastructures. Businesses are increasingly separating and distributing their data flows and critical functions across multiple clouds from different service providers. According to Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud Report, an overwhelming 92% of enterprises say they now have a multi-cloud strategy, and 82% say they have a hybrid cloud strategy.

    There are many reasons for this increase in adoption. Developers that use containers, for example, can test their applications across multiple systems in the multi-cloud environment to speed up innovation, due to containers’ agility and portability. This use of multiple clouds also allows businesses to tackle cloud migrations in a more measured and deliberate manner rather than a ‘big bang’ approach.

    What this also means, however, is that it multiplies IT’s stress as they deliberate the benefits, costs and risks of moving their business to a multi-cloud strategy. For example, they must consider whether or not to keep their data on-premises, migrate it to a public cloud or some combination of both. They must also ensure their application’s ironclad security, which has become a mission-critical consideration during the unrelenting cybersecurity emergency that is the pandemic. Meanwhile, they may worry that such a large-scale cloud migration will result in lost revenue and increased downtime.

    With these key considerations and challenges in mind, here are five tips to help enterprises seamlessly migrate their resources to a multi-cloud environment.

    Assess Your Application’s Ripeness

    Before any application is migrated, it’s necessary to do a complete audit of current applications to assess their readiness for the migration. Businesses should look at the application’s dependencies and the ecosystem it lives in. This ecosystem could be its physical and virtual network infrastructure, including configurations, policies, load balancers, security and compliance requirements.

    Plan and Prepare

    This is a particularly challenging phase, as IT teams often linger here; wasting valuable hours and productivity. Therefore, the entire organization must outline what their migration journey will look like, discuss which departments will be affected during the process, and delegate responsibilities to facilitate a smooth transition to the cloud. The IT operations team, the development and quality assurance teams, key stakeholders and leadership should all be involved in these discussions—and should share the goal of ensuring a predictable migration process.

    Carefully Weigh Your Cloud Options

    Choosing the right cloud depends entirely on the unique needs, challenges and opportunities for the organization. While there are a number of different providers available to every enterprise, the best option will be influenced by financial constraints, goals for cloud adoption and even the systems already in place.

    Of course, when a business is taking a multi-cloud approach, these decisions become that much more difficult—especially in light of the fact that the average cloud company uses 2.6 public clouds and 2.7 private clouds, according to the Flexera report. Connectivity between these providers is crucial, with 88% of businesses enabling their multi-cloud strategy with a private connection.

    With this in mind, it’s also absolutely vital that decision-makers consider the security risks associated with each provider, as well. The number of cyberattacks on enterprises’ cloud infrastructures has increased significantly since the onset of COVID-19. With the stakes so high, a migration partner can help businesses assess which cloud providers are the right fit for them; accounting for their cost-effectiveness as well as which options will pose the least friction for the migration.

    Construct Your Migration Checklist

    The migration of an enterprise’s workloads is the most critical step of its cloud journey, and every company’s objective is to make a move swiftly and seamlessly. Creating a checklist can help businesses achieve this goal, as it helps them to prioritize the most critical components of their journey and understand the repercussions of a stagnant or inefficient migration.

    For example, every business should aim to achieve minimum downtime during their migration process and little to no disruption of service. Both the loss of network access and system downtime can cause immediate pain in the form of lost productivity and opportunities and even more harmful damage to a company’s brand. In fact, according to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute, meaning a well-practiced and efficient migration strategy has a significant impact on a company’s financial health.

    Since each migration is unique to the business and, often, unforeseen challenges arise that are native to the environment, it’s beneficial for organizations to have an expert migration team or partner to help them develop their checklist and ensure their migrations are streamlined and airtight.

    Validate Your Cloud Journey

    As the final step in a business’ migration journey, companies must validate that all their resources from their previous environment are fully migrated and operational in their target cloud environments. This step is crucial, as it marks the completion of a successful multi-cloud migration journey! This is primarily a manual process ensuring that nothing is neglected or forgotten and is often followed by an entire testing lifecycle.

    Post-Migration Pointers

    Cloud migrations can be complex, especially for companies relying on a years-old traditional and highly manual approach. Thankfully, in the age of automation, enterprises today are experiencing substantial time and cost savings and deploying migration strategies that move their workloads across multiple clouds in seconds instead of days.

    But even when an organization’s migration journey is complete, the management of several clouds at once creates its own set of challenges and risks—especially true in today’s landscape of skyrocketing climate and cybersecurity risks. It’s therefore vital that business leaders heighten their focus on organizational resiliency and minimizing downtime through things like tightened security and effective disaster recovery strategies.

    After all, with hybrid work forcing C-suites to scale their digital transformation plans even further, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the future of work is in the cloud. It’s therefore imperative that as cloud spending soars, enterprises allocate substantial resources not only to migration and management but protection, too.

  • SAIC Launches CloudScend to Accelerate Agencies’ Move to the Cloud

    Proven approach combines platform automation, analytics, and security tools to help agencies continuously modernize to transform how they meet mission priorities

    Reston, VA, July 14, 2021—Science Applications International Corp. (NYSE: SAIC) today announced the launch of CloudScend™, a cohesive solution of integrated platform automation tools, security protocols and processes to help federal agencies plan for and accelerate the migration of large-scale workloads to the cloud and innovate further once they’re there.

    CloudScend leverages SAIC’s deep experience in helping government organizations obtain the benefits of the cloud to determine the best way to prioritize the migration of strategic workloads. The comprehensive framework enables agencies to map requirements to mission needs and achieve a clear view of their path to the cloud with detailed insights and a proven methodology.

    “Bold moves require confident blueprints, and nowhere is that more true than when speaking of transitioning to the cloud,” said Sanjay Sardar, senior vice president, Digital Transformation and IT Modernization, at SAIC. “The CloudScend solution helps federal customers quickly and securely migrate large-scale workloads and future-proof cloud environments to incorporate new waves of emerging technologies.”

    CloudScend incorporates a wide range of security controls and automated processes, so agencies can seamlessly migrate systems and applications while monitoring the health of code and team performance at every step. With CloudScend, federal customers can flexibly apply continuous modernization practices to meet evolving mission requirements.

    CloudScend, designed with five key phases, offers a consistent repeatable approach to cloud migration – customized to meet the unique needs of government organizations regardless of where they are in their modernization journey. The five key phases are:

    • Explore: Use specific business, technical and financial criteria and tools to determine an organization’s future state, architecture, and roadmap.
    • Automate: Manage complex cloud environments through a proven, automated multi-cloud managed services delivery platform.
    • Secure: Leverage SAIC’s proven zero trust architecture approach to secure assets, applications, and data to the expected classification levels.
    • Migrate: Rapidly and securely develop and deploy applications with a highly-orchestrated software engineering pipeline, automate testing and quality control, and continuously monitor application performance.
    • Optimize: Actively measure and manage the performance of multi-cloud environments in support of the mission.

    CloudScend provides the tools to help government organizations with enterprise-level planning and migration, zero trust security with automated processes, and multi-cloud capability – all adaptable to evolving mission needs and tailorable to unique agency requirements. For more information on SAIC CloudScend and to explore how to anchor your future to a cloud foundation that will operate at the speed of technology, visit www.saic.com/cloudScend.

    About SAIC

    SAIC® is a premier Fortune 500® technology integrator driving our nation’s technology transformation. Our robust portfolio of offerings across the defense, space, civilian, and intelligence markets includes secure high-end solutions in engineering, digital, artificial intelligence, and mission solutions. Using our expertise and understanding of existing and emerging technologies, we integrate the best components from our own portfolio and our partner ecosystem to deliver innovative, effective, and efficient solutions that are critical to achieving our customers’ missions.

    We are more than 26,000 strong; driven by mission, united by purpose, and inspired by opportunities. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, SAIC has pro forma annual revenues of approximately $7.1 billion.​​​​ For more information, visit saic.com. For ongoing news, please visit our newsroom.

    Forward-Looking Statements

    Certain statements in this release contain or are based on “forward-looking” information within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by words such as “expects,” “intends,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “believes,” “estimates,” “guidance,” and similar words or phrases. Forward-looking statements in this release may include, among others, estimates of future revenues, operating income, earnings, earnings per share, charges, total contract value, backlog, outstanding shares and cash flows, as well as statements about future dividends, share repurchases and other capital deployment plans. Such statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risk, uncertainties and assumptions, and actual results may differ materially from the guidance and other forward-looking statements made in this release as a result of various factors. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause or contribute to these material differences include those discussed in the “Risk Factors,” “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and “Legal Proceedings” sections of our Annual Report on Form 10-K, as updated in any subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other filings with the SEC, which may be viewed or obtained through the Investor Relations section of our website at saic.com or on the SEC’s website at sec.gov. Due to such risks, uncertainties and assumptions you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. SAIC expressly disclaims any duty to update any forward-looking statement provided in this release to reflect subsequent events, actual results or changes in SAIC’s expectations. SAIC also disclaims any duty to comment upon or correct information that may be contained in reports published by investment analysts or others.

  • Cloud Governance Can Trim Cloud Costs

    Cloud Governance Can Trim Cloud Costs

    The abrupt need to transition to remote work last year caused many companies to migrate to the cloud or accelerate an in-process migration. Cloud has become an essential part of company operations and budgets. Last year, worldwide end user spending on public cloud services was $257.5 billion, making up 9.1% of total global enterprise IT spending, and it’s forecasted to increase to 14.2% by 2024, according to Gartner.

    Upfront Cloud Costs

    The allure of cloud for organizations is its potential to save money, increase agility and offer easier scalability. However, these promises don’t materialize without proper management. Organizations will likely see an initial rise in costs with cloud adoption. Organizations spend, on average, 12% more running a workload in IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) compared to when it happens in their own data center. These cost increases occur when work is lifted and shifted without modification.

    Like any change, there will be upfront costs involved with the process of migrating to the cloud that need to be considered. With careful planning, organizations can avoid surprises. Items that need to be factored in when budgeting include the cost of cloud infrastructure, labor costs associated with migrating applications to the cloud, and the monthly bill from cloud providers. Many cloud providers provide cost calculators to help organizations determine what to expect when migrating to the cloud.

    Managing Cost

    A factor that is key to managing cloud costs is planning for the monthly cloud bill. Without proper monitoring, this is where overspend can occur—57% of IT leaders have exceeded their cloud budgets at some point, according to a 2018 Softchoice survey. One of the issues is the lack of visibility that leaders have into their cloud costs. A lag in your cloud billing data makes it difficult to make accurate decisions, which can be the case with spend reports from cloud providers that are 12 to 24 hours old.

    A lack of timely visibility into current costs and the inability to forecast future costs leads to cost overruns and blown budgets, which is why having a product that provides the most up-to-date information and monitors your budget is important. There is no use in budgeting if it’s not being monitored. Let me repeat: an unmonitored budget is useless.

    Timely visibility and monitoring your budget fall under financial control of your cloud—one of the three pillars of cloud governance. Cloud governance includes the development and implementation of budget controls, as well as controls to manage access and ensure ongoing compliance.. A cloud management product can help with this by not only keeping your budget under control and alerting you before you go over that budget, but also by finding saving opportunities through ongoing optimization.

    Using these tools means you can automatically find out about ways to save your organization money.

    The other two pillars of cloud governance, managing access and ensuring compliance, also impact your overall cost in the cloud. A robust governance and management solution establishes proactive protocols that can automate tasks such as account setup and ensuring compliance with your security standards. Automating controls will save your organization time and money. Monitoring and ensuring that your cloud is secure will help you avoid costly security breaches. When adopting the cloud, a plan for implementing cloud governance should be at the forefront to help you realize the cost savings of cloud.

    Despite the initial costs of scaling to the cloud, in the long term, cloud adoption does result in cost savings. Once organizations move away from managing on-premises data centers and implement cloud governance in their cloud environment, that’s when opportunities for innovation can happen due to time and money being saved. For example, when Riso, a printer and digital copier manufacturer, migrated to AWS, the company cut its total IT operational costs by 55%. Avery Dennison, a manufacturing company that specializes in labeling, saw an annual run rate savings of $5 million due to investing in cloud-first initiatives. These are just some examples of how the cloud has helped companies optimize their costs. It can be possible for your organization to reap similar benefits with proper planning and the implementation of cloud governance.

  • How to Know if You Need Multi-Cloud — and Succeed if You Do

    How to Know if You Need Multi-Cloud — and Succeed if You Do

    There are many good reasons for running in multiple clouds, as well as times when multi-cloud environments are unavoidable due to organizational history or legal reasons. However, operating in multiple clouds adds complexity, increases operational overhead and can become expensive. Organizations should only pursue it when they have clear business reasons for doing so.

    In this article, I’m going to cover some common situations when organizations can get value out of multi-cloud as well as strategies for success. Because multi-cloud is hard, the first question organizations should ask themselves is, “Do we really need multi-cloud?” So, the first order of business is to outline when technology leaders are better off avoiding multi-cloud altogether.

    When Multi-Cloud is a Bad Idea

    A single application and its data should never span multiple clouds, if it can be avoided. Here are some common reasons organizations adopt a multi-cloud approach when they would be better off avoiding it.

    Short-term bursting (in hybrid cases). “I’ll just tap into a public cloud if my private cloud suddenly needs extra capacity.”

    Disaster recovery. “Let’s run this application on AWS and Google in case one of them disappears overnight.”

    Staying cloud-agnostic. “By running on multiple clouds, we are no longer locked in.”

    In all the cases above, network latency and egress cost will hurt your application and your business. In the best-case scenario, you will spend a lot of time and effort prematurely optimizing for unlikely scenarios.

    Unless you’re perfectly prepared, please, don’t go there.

    When Multi-Cloud is a Necessary Evil

    There are also plenty of times when multi-cloud is a drag on the engineering organization and a drag on the business — but can’t be avoided. Here are totally legitimate reasons to have a multi-cloud setup that will still require more effort to maintain than operating in a single cloud.

    Mergers and acquisitions. Some organizations can end up operating in public clouds and private clouds as they acquire other companies. The effort required to migrate everything to one cloud provider often isn’t worth it, so everyone continues using the same cloud they used pre-acquisition.

    Legal. Depending on the type of data you gather and the jurisdictions you operate in, you may have to worry about where your cloud provider has regions available. There will be times when you need a data center in multiple jurisdictions; none of the cloud providers are in all of them. In those cases, you don’t have much choice, you need to be multi-cloud.

    If you need to use multiple cloud providers, either for legal reasons or because of mergers, it’s best to focus on making multi-cloud management as painless as possible — while still accepting that it will not be as smooth an experience as running all workloads in a single cloud.

    When Multi-Cloud is a Solid Strategic Move

    There are also some very good reasons to adopt a multi-cloud approach on purpose. For example:

    Facilitating engineering speed. Engineering speed is paramount. Companies who focus on using multi-cloud to become cloud-agnostic and avoid lock-in often sacrifice development velocity, but if the organization instead uses multi-cloud to allow everyone on the team to use the tools and environment they are most comfortable with, it can increase velocity.

    Best-of-breed tooling. The cloud providers’ offerings are not totally identical. Multi-cloud can let organizations use the best tools from each cloud provider; for example, machine learning technology from Google, compute from AWS and business intelligence from Azure.

    Better customer experience. Especially if latency is a big concern, a multi-cloud approach can help organizations get physically closer to users, providing a better customer experience.

    There is a common thread here: When evaluating whether or not you have a legitimate need for multi-cloud, the key question is whether you will be fulfilling a psychological need, a theoretical need (in other words, something that you do not actually need at this moment but might at some future date) or a concrete legal or technical need that you can easily describe. If there are no concrete legal, technical or business reasons for pursuing multi-cloud, don’t. There are costs to pursuing multi-cloud, so organizations that won’t actually reap benefits from it shouldn’t attempt it.

    How to Succeed

    Multi-cloud is hard. Here’s how to increase your chances of success so you can get the business benefits of better tooling or better customer experiences from your multi-cloud deployments.

    Use a cloud management platform. Getting a single pane of glass for all your deployments is critical to managing multiple clouds without pulling your hair out. This abstraction, however, comes at the cost of supporting very deep and cloud provider-specific use cases, for example, using obscure service X.

    Standardize workflows with Terraform and Ansible. You need to have processes that are as repeatable and predictable as possible. Even with standardized workflows, you still have to adjust for each environment, but the more standardization the better.

    Use Kubernetes. Kubernetes lets you abstract the infrastructure layer and move workloads around more easily, even across clouds. The caveat here is that you have to adopt microservices and deal with the increased complexity of managing Kubernetes and its underlying infrastructure.

    Each of the above approaches has its merits and flaws. They are not mutually exclusive, and you should not treat them like they are. Be prepared to mix and match depending on your needs.

    Weigh the Costs and Benefits

    Sometimes companies are not realistic about their technical capacity or what their needs are. They want the ability to do the latest thing they read about without thinking about whether or not that technology or approach will provide business benefits.

    Multi-cloud adds a huge amount of complexity to your deployment. If multi-cloud truly is essential, however, use tools and platforms that hide that complexity from users and can simplify the management process.

  • Cloud Migration Monitoring: A Practical Guide

    Cloud Migration Monitoring: A Practical Guide

    Almost every organization has transitioned some operational systems to the cloud. DevOps professionals are an essential part of migration projects, facilitating the migration itself, and making sure applications work as expected and provide satisfactory performance after the migration.

    To make your next cloud migration a success, you must get monitoring right. Applications must be monitored at every stage of the migration—when the application is still running on-premises, during migration and once the new workload is running in the cloud.

    In this article, we will explain key metrics to track during your migration, monitoring considerations at every stage of the migration cycle, and free tools offered by the major cloud providers that can help you monitor your migration.

    What to Monitor During a Cloud Migration

    There are many components involved in a cloud migration process. There are several approaches to cloud migration—each migration is unique, and might necessitate setting up different metrics. However, there are several aspects that can be considered mandatory when monitoring your cloud migration process:

    • Tracking application traffic. Tracking application traffic can help you validate that application configurations are properly defined and validate the availability of the entire application. You should ensure that all requests arrive to the new server, and keep an eye on the error rate. Additionally, watch for response times to ensure your application is not exceeding the planned thresholds.
    • Tracking your costs. Tracking costs can help you ensure that you are not incurring unexpected losses. The majority of organizations migrate to the cloud to reduce their costs. However, incorrect implementation of cloud resources may lead to losses. You can gain visibility into your costs by leveraging first-party cloud tools, like AWS Billing, which natively integrate into the pipeline, monitor costs, and show visualized data in customized dashboards. You can also use these tools to set up alerts.
    • Monitoring application security. Application security monitoring can help you identify security vulnerabilities and incidents during and after the migration process. You should monitor infrastructure configurations, such as internal traffic, host open ports and instance processes that are actively accessing different services. Additionally, keep watch for API hits per second, which might indicate a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

    Monitoring Aspects of the Migration Life Cycle

    Cloud service providers typically identify three main phases of the migration process, which are referred to as the plan, migrate and run phases.

    Plan Phase

    The plan phase helps you assess the performance levels of your applications before migrating. The goal is to achieve an in-depth understanding of how workloads are functioning pre-migration, as well as the current state of user experience. This data can then be used to establish performance benchmarks and baselines.

    Performance baselines, like error rates, page load times and slow transactions, can help you set up configuration alerts that keep track of outages across the cloud migration process. You can then quickly diagnose the situation and apply fixes that ensure application health during and after the migration.

    Here are several questions that can help you during the plan phase:

    1. What is the application baseline?
    2. How will the migration process affect user experience?
    3. What are the potential technical challenges expected during the migration process?
    4. Can the corporate network support additional bandwidth needs?
    5. What are the steps needed to start the migration process?

    Migrate Phase

    The migrate phase involves all processes required to securely move components from one location to another. During this process, you should continuously monitor performance to ensure user experience remains within the pre-established baseline. However, migrating to the cloud means you no longer have control over all configurations.

    To ensure application performance and stability during the migration process, you need to identify potential roadblocks and issues, and continuously monitor and validate the process. You should test critical aspects like application response time and call counts, and troubleshoot issues quickly.

    Run Phase

    The run phase starts right after the migration process is complete. During the post-migration phase, you need to establish proactive monitoring processes. The goal is to ensure your application performs well in the cloud; using the expected resources and without incurring overhead.

    When monitoring your application, keep track of service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure the cloud vendor meets the requirements agreed upon. You should also monitor for changes and review individual variables that might cause issues.

    Additionally, you should make sure all connections between applications are maintained after the migration.

    Free Cloud Migration Monitoring Tools

    The three major cloud providers—Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—provide tools that help automate migration to their clouds, and also assist with the crucial aspects of monitoring. These tools are offered free, because it is in the best interest of the cloud providers to allow easy, frictionless migration.

    The following table summarizes migration monitoring capabilities available from each cloud provider.

    Cloud Provider Tool

    What it Helps Monitor

    AWS Migration Services

    Helps automate migration of applications that rely on databases.
    • Continually monitors source and target databases
    • Able to restart failed migrations
    • Oversees continuous data replication
    • Integrates with first-party AWS monitoring tools

    Azure Migration Tools

    Provides a migration hub that lets organizations manage large migration projects.
    • Tracks migration process and current status for server and database migrations
    • Allows external tools to integrate and track migrations
    • Reports on compliance aspects of migrations

    Migrate for Google Compute Engine

    Formerly known as Velostrata, this tool automates migration of on-premises systems, with automated roll back in case of errors.
    • Validation of workloads for migration compatibility
    • Ongoing oversight of streaming data transfers
    • Ability to roll back migration to on-premises systems in case of error

    Monitoring is critical for a successful cloud migration, and it’s important to use monitoring at every stage of a cloud migration:

    • During the plan phase, establish a baseline of application performance before it is migrated to the cloud.
    • During the migration phase, carefully monitor application behavior and troubleshoot issues.
    • During the run phase, validate that the application performs as expected and is meeting SLAs.

    I hope this will be useful as you plan and execute your next cloud migration project.

  • Cloud Migrations Demand Risk and Compliance Maturity

    Cloud Migrations Demand Risk and Compliance Maturity

    The COVID-19 pandemic brought undeniable disruptions for organizations and their employees whether business, personal or otherwise. Across the globe, businesses and governments alike were forced to try and manage these disruptions. For nearly all organizations, digitization initiatives were accelerated in a short period of time, from implementing work-from-home policies and launching new applications to support a distributed workforce to adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to adapt supply chain processes and more.

    According to Gartner, by 2022, 30% of all security teams will have increased the number of employees working remotely on a permanent basis and by 2023, 40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services. The distributed cloud enables organizations to provide products and services when they’re needed in this era of work-from-anywhere, whether to their employees or customers.

    Even in sectors such as energy and utilities, which are historically heavily reliant on standard on-premises installations and had often avoided cloud adoption, business leaders are realizing the value of migration, especially in light of the global pandemic. These businesses are able to deliver digital products with speed, experiment with tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) to increase productivity and to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) across assets, among other benefits. Still, cloud migration risks abound, and new challenges may arise. A risk that cannot be ignored is the cybersecurity risk. Meeting regulatory IT compliance and managing risks involved with cloud computing are top challenges facing those migrating their workloads to the cloud.

    Cloud Migrations and Security: Clear Risk and Compliance Gaps

    Many cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud and others have a global network of service models that include compliance teams and consulting organizations that help with risk and compliance for their cloud instances, whether public, private or hybrid cloud. Many of them have even built tools for customers to use to implement basic risk and compliance management in-house, leveraging relevant data and applications. However, monitoring and meeting security and compliance controls that span people, processes and technology for cloud environments, and in the broader context of the enterprise, is complex. This is one cause of cloud migration risk, and is a challenge for many other reasons; lack of measurement, visibility and accuracy are three of the greatest risks when migrating to the cloud. The point solutions that currently support most cloud instances don’t elevate the posture of cloud environments to that of the enterprise risk posture, and the majority of assessments still remain point-in-time and qualitative. Metrics are fractured and far from holistic, and very few, if any, solutions can provide insight beyond compliance and into real-time risk management.

    IT and security regulations and standards are filled with requirements that were created before the cloud became a commodity. In the energy sector, for example, cloud security isn’t taken into account because regulators and industry leaders couldn’t fathom those platforms becoming as pervasive as they have, because on-premises installations were standard to the industry. On-premises installations are still a mainstay in energy, power and utilities, and for those who have become more comfortable with cloud migration processes, there is a clear and pressing need to leverage their human capital, processes and technologies to implement robust risk management practices.

    Beyond regulatory compliance lags, many distributed organizations opt to have multiple providers in place, requiring a multi-cloud approach to compliance requirements and risk assessment. As more organizations consider cloud migration risks and begin shaping their cloud migration strategies, there are some innovations that address risk management and compliance in the cloud, but not many. Measuring, managing and reporting on compliance frameworks, making the shared responsibility model actionable, and getting a view into risk are all serious challenges. Cloud providers will continue to mature and bring new innovations to their services, but, to date, there hasn’t been a lot of anticipatory work done in this area. The focus has largely been on creating reactive solutions. In heavily regulated countries, the challenges only become greater.

    Leverage AI Automation for Compliance and Risk Management

    There is a shift occurring in cybersecurity and IT risk management, calling for the dramatic disruption of the legacy IT governance, risk and compliance (GRC) space and demanding a reevaluation of how we manage compliance and risk in the digital age. For years, data has been aggregated manually and analyses performed on out-of-date information. With the increasing availability of automation, the five functions of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework – identify, protect, detect, respond and recover – are becoming more continuous in nature and shifting into real-time management, from assessment to reporting and more.

    Leveraging this technology in the cloud is no exception, but those who look to reinvent their approach must look for solutions that go beyond the siloed capabilities of cloud security posture management solutions and similar markets.

    Ultimately, the true test of this next-generation approach comes when organizations are able to roll all of this data up to risk. With risk metrics that are supported by drill-downs, trend reports and risk profiles, executives can get the visibility they need into their posture with the most up-to-date data, informing their key business decisions. Using this next-generation approach to risk will inform global expansion, allow executives to evaluate risk across lines of business, and increase cyber maturity in any cloud-based organization.

  • How to Optimize Your Cloud Operations

    How to Optimize Your Cloud Operations

    Taking a holistic approach to cloud optimization and application modernization can help keep cloud spend in check

    There’s a fine line between cloud spend and cloud sprawl. Most companies today are using cloud technologies to power their most important products and services, communications and collaboration, but it’s easy to cross the line from spending smartly on cloud services to spending unnecessarily.

    Gaining control of cloud operations and cloud spend should be a goal for every organization, big or small. The good news is, it’s not as tough as you think. With a few smart moves, every company can become a cloud operations optimizer. Below are a few tips.

    3 Tips for Cloud Optimization

    Gain Complete Visibility Into Your Data

    It’s all about gaining a comprehensive view of all your data, pulling correct metrics, ensuring tagging best practices are followed and analyzing/interpreting what is going on. Many of the cloud optimization tools out there don’t pull the necessary information (actual RAM usage, for example) to accurately make meaningful recommendations.

    Compute resource data is only part of it; having a deep financial understanding around when to make RI/Savings Plans purchases and EDP/EA negotiation are just as important. You don’t want to pay for too much coverage or too little, and ideally you don’t want to make those decisions before you know your environment has been optimized.

    Know your Applications

    Cloud providers offer multiple financial methods of procuring resources such as savings plans, reserved instances, spot resources, EDP/EA plans, etc. Knowing how your users are interacting with your applications is key to understanding which financial option will make the most sense and achieving maximum savings.

    For example, a client has an application that is very spikey in utilization and is only accessed at certain hours during the workweek. Purchasing a Compute or EC2 savings plan or reserved instances may not be as cost-effective as applying auto-parking policies or utilizing spot resources (or a combination of both), since the application doesn’t need to be on all of the time.

    Non-Traditional Cloud Services

    Frequently, clients migrating to the cloud will simply perform a 1-for-1 migration and carry with it the traditional three-tier architecture (web/app/database). Getting out of that mentality can be a struggle for many clients, but having awareness of what is going on in the cloud environment at the application layer can help formulate a strategy for that over time. It can also help transition that mentality away from traditional architecture into more cloud-native services (containers/serverless, for example), which can provide cost savings and improved performance and open the door to more advanced services that can be taken advantage of in the future, such as machine learning and AI.

    Mistakes to Avoid

    Too often, companies believe that their cloud environment is already optimized. A typical cloud provider rolls out approximately 20 to 30 new features and updates per week. Multiply that by three for the top cloud platform providers (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud), and you have a daunting challenge of keeping up with everything. This takes the client away from doing their most important job: running their business.

    Companies also have a tendency to not think about optimization or application modernization when deciding to move to the cloud. A lot of clients will simply look at their compute requirements that are being utilized in their data center and build the exact same thing in the public cloud. While this will get them to the cloud more quickly in most cases, there tends to be a lot of waste when performing this method. The sooner you can start thinking about optimizing, the better.

    And, finally, too many companies take a traditional data center operations mentality to the cloud. The cloud continues to offer more and more advanced services that can greatly benefit a business.

    Conclusion

    Taking a holistic approach to optimization and application modernization leaves no stone unturned, typically generates enough savings to pay for itself, and, once implemented on a regular basis, will ensure that application performance meets demand. This is especially effective for clients with large cloud spend and dynamic environments.

    The best way to optimize cloud operations and spend is by engaging a managed services provider (MSP) and realizing that there is no single tool that can provide the type of analysis most companies need. Optimization requires both in-depth technical and cloud financial knowledge. It also requires collaboration between the MSP and all of a company’s business units to gain an understanding of their needs and application usage. Once all the data has been collected and interviews performed, recommendations can be delivered. It’s then up to the client, in collaboration with the MSP, to implement those recommendations to achieve true optimization and ultimately realize cost savings.

  • 20/20 Network Visibility: Making Cloud Migration a Success

    20/20 Network Visibility: Making Cloud Migration a Success

    Organizations need to take a considered and gradual approach to cloud migration to ensure security and compliance

    For businesses to succeed in 2021 and beyond, agility and responsiveness are critical. Data is the new currency, and businesses need to be able to access theirs instantly and securely to make the rapid-fire business decisions that will make or break their long-term strategies. One way IT can improve responsiveness and business agility is by moving business applications to the cloud.

    When migrating applications to the cloud, the need for network security is often overlooked. When this happens, applications are deployed in the cloud without adequate security and compliance measures in place—or, conversely, the security team steps in and halts the migration process.

    This puts the company at risk: Inadequate security makes it easier for hackers to access the network and mount an attack against the company, exposing the company to financial losses and legal repercussions. Moreover, if the business is unable to respond to market demands in a timely fashion, there are clear financial implications.

    The Challenge of Security

    Cloud migration comes with several benefits, but it also exposes a number of security risks. With every advantage comes a cost, and it is up to businesses to do whatever they can to mitigate that risk to leverage the cloud to its fullest potential.

    An AlgoSec survey found that organizations reported a range of problems when migrating to public clouds, with 44% having difficulty managing security policies post-migration and nearly a third struggling to map application traffic flows at the start. Respondents also had concerns about applications in the cloud, with the greatest worry being cyberattacks (58%) and unauthorized access (53%) followed by application outages and misconfigured cloud security controls.

    But this shouldn’t stop progress from happening. To demonstrate this, let’s take four of the biggest advantages of cloud migration and outline the security challenges that come with them.

    1. Security and Data Protection

    When adopting the public cloud, data itself is much more accessible no matter where it is located, but this does not come without a cost. Data in the cloud is highly regulated and therefore subject to greater regulatory compliance—for example, under GDPR in the EU. Once the data is no longer kept on-premises, security must be tightened and additional security controls must be employed to demonstrate greater control over data storage and usage, in accordance with set guidelines. There are best practices to uphold, as well as financial penalties if organizations do not comply with them.

    1. Agility

    Spinning up a server in the cloud takes mere minutes. Cloud computing requires no hardware and no locally installed software; all you need is a credit card and you can be up and running with your very own cloud-based infrastructure almost instantly. Some businesses are powered purely through SaaS and IaaS services, and it makes them incredibly nimble in rapidly changing times. But this agility also comes with risks. For security to be tight, businesses need complete visibility, and that is not always possible when working exclusively in the cloud. Therefore, stronger pre-fail measures and cloud firewalls are needed, as well as established baselines for allowed connectivity for each cloud server used.

    1. Cost-saving

    The cloud offers zero maintenance and capital cost along with reduced IT support costs. You also have the added benefit of only paying for what you use, which means you don’t have to purchase expensive hardware that you would only need during peak times. However, there may be hidden costs depending on which provider you use, so you will want to monitor usage and cloud assets more generally, ensuring they’re optimized and working as efficiently as possible.

    1. Time to market

    When the cloud is coupled with DevOps practices and tools, organizations can gain a flexible framework in which to build with zero capital investment. PaaS has revolutionized time-to-market for these organizations, but this too comes with risk. With so many teams collaborating on development and so many moving parts in the process, security is often sidelined and even forgotten, meaning it gets tacked on at the end of the process, leaving gaps that can be exploited.

    What these organizations need is a security policy automation that supports the DevOps methodology, and more importantly the DevSecOps approach to building a security foundation. This solution needs to be able to automatically copy the firewall rules—and then make the necessary modifications to map rules to the new objects when the rules are applied to each new environment in the DevOps life cycle. With the right automation solution, security can be baked into the entire process.

    Cloud migration is absolutely essential for businesses that want to stay market-fit and competitive. But too often security seems to fall down the list of priorities, causing damaging problems in the long run. So how should organizations approach their cloud migration projects to ensure that security and compliance are not compromised during or after the migration?

    Visibility Is Key in Cloud Migration

    Obtaining an inventory of applications is a key requirement when migrating to the cloud. Most businesses have two types of applications—enterprise and departmental—and it should be relatively easy to obtain the necessary connectivity information needed to migrate them to the cloud. The key here is to know that these applications exist.

    Once the list of applications is in place, you can move onto the next stage in the process of closing the security gap as you migrate to the cloud: identifying and sealing any vulnerabilities in the server that could be exploited by a hacker and understanding network connectivity requirements and application attributes such as the number of servers and associated business processes. These elements help determine the complexity involved in migrating applications.

    Several attributes can affect the complexity of migrating an application to the cloud, including its specific connectivity requirements and the firewall rules that allow/deny that connectivity. Mapping this connectivity provides a deeper understanding of network traffic, which then provides insight into the flows you will need to migrate and maintain with the application in the cloud. The more applications that utilize a server, the more difficult it is to migrate an application that depends on that server. It may be necessary to migrate the server itself or migrate multiple applications at the same time.

    Mapping the firewall rules provides insight into the security measures you will need to put in place once the application has been migrated to the cloud. As a rule of thumb, the more firewall rules are required, the greater the complexity. This mapping allows you to identify and decommission firewall rules that are no longer necessary post-migration.

    So how do you generate documentation of application connectivity? The obvious choice is to employ a solution that automatically maps the various network traffic flows, servers and firewall rules for each application. If you do not have access to such an automation solution, manually documenting—however tedious—will provide the necessary information.

    Adopting a Migration Strategy

    For most businesses, digital transformation is a gradual evolution that requires forethought and strategy to get it right. An organization might choose to only move a few of its applications onto the cloud to begin with and may even choose to use one or more cloud vendors for their needs. Either way, organizations still have a responsibility to manage and maintain security and compliance in the cloud, just as they did on-premises. This will need a deeper understanding of cloud security controls and how they connect to on-premises security devices, made possible by enhanced visibility and automated network management.

    No matter which approach they take to cloud migration, organizations need to take a considered and gradual approach, understanding that the responsibility to manage the security and compliance of their services still lies firmly at their door.

  • Going Through a Cloud Migration? AIOps Can Help

    Going Through a Cloud Migration? AIOps Can Help

    AIOps can help ease many of the challenges associated with cloud migration

    As businesses seek to compete in the digital economy and better engage with customers through new digital experiences, they have become increasingly reliant on cloud as a critical component of their digital transformation strategies. This has never been more true than during the COVID-19 pandemic, when businesses across all industries are aiming to provide the best digital experiences possible in our new, heavily remote world.

    Gartner validates this reliance on cloud in a recently published report, which states that although IT spending is set to decline in 2020 due to the impact of COVID-19, the pandemic’s increase in remote work has set public cloud services to grow 19% this year.

    There’s no doubt that cloud migration can be challenging, but properly preparing and utilizing tools such as AIOps can help initiate this process and can provide ongoing visibility.

    The Ingredient for a Successful Cloud Migration

    AIOps helps identify and resolve issues before they disrupt the end user during a cloud migration, arming technologists with insights and providing visibility within multi-cloud and containerized environments as companies manage their complex platforms.

    A surge of data can be managed in the cloud but can be difficult to manage without having visibility across the platform. AIOps offers an overview and provides updates and optimization suggestions, which helps businesses be competitive and have control.

    The AIOps and Cloud Migration Process

    AIOps exists to help with big IT challenges and there is a suggested path businesses can use pre-, during and post-migration.

    Pre-Migration

    Before the migration begins, you should measure the existing performance of your applications as a baseline. You can then define performance goals and find bottlenecks you should avoid during your cloud migration. You must evaluate the potential impact of your cloud migration on your IT environment, which AIOps can help with. With robust visibility, you can see results on applications that power your business.

    During Migration

    Once you have migrated your workloads to the cloud, you can utilize machine learning and AI to check which resources might be underused. AIOps on the cloud will provide insight on overused resources, so you can identify instances that are best for your company’s needs.

    Post-Migration

    Being able to monitor your services on the cloud and end user performance gives full visibility into what you are getting from your cloud provider. Needs can change over time, so a cloud migration strategy that incorporates AIOps can identify what can be altered. This functionality helps make it clear which applications could benefit from being moved.

    The reliance on cloud support is only increasing, so the sooner you incorporate AIOps into your IT environment, the faster you can have confidence your services will deliver improved performance for the end user. Why not get the most out of your investment in the cloud by using AIOps to support your business for the long term?

    AppDynamics is sponsoring KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2020 North America, taking place Nov. 17-20. To learn more about how AppDynamics is supporting businesses in their cloud migration journeys, register for our webinar during the show here.

  • Are We There Yet? The Long, Hot Road Trip to the Cloud

    Are We There Yet? The Long, Hot Road Trip to the Cloud

     “If I have to pull this car over, there will be trouble!” Does this sentence evoke childhood memories of summer adventures in the family car? It’s the same sort of dread we get when the IT budget-holder turns around and threatens to pull over on our journey to the cloud or hybrid cloud. The family summer road trip may be filled with great expectations, but the last thing we want is an unforeseen disruption along the way. And migration to the cloud is no different. To continue this analogy, the bumps on the road to avoid are the ones around cost, performance and risk. So, here are some thoughts on how to identify the challenges and navigate to your destination smoothly.

    The Line of Business Needs To Pee (They Think) …

    Or even worse—“we just stopped, why didn’t you go then?!?!” Planning business needs is always a challenge—especially at the speed of change in today’s disruptive markets. The unforeseen impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is one example. We hear it a lot in our industry: “We don’t know which applications are using the most bandwidth and how much they are costing us.” And with 59% of infrastructure managers citing infrastructure cost overruns as their biggest concern, there’s definitely room for immediate improvement. Having clarity into your application topology with a clear map to performance is mission-critical for a successful hybrid cloud journey.

    Because this is such a dynamic process, it needs to be mapped and measured daily, in real-time. But simply automating VMs to workload balance does not give you the clarity needed to understand what and when to move in your hybrid journey. You need the ability to understand why and when things changed so you can effectively plan or resolve the issues. According to Gartner Research, on average, AWS deployments are 40% over-provisioned to meet unexpected capacity and performance issues, which defeats the purpose of moving to the public cloud. “Know before you go” should be a mantra for every hybrid journey manager—and parent managing backseat bladder needs.

    IT Just Hit a Major Pothole and Now Has a Flat Tire

    A flat tire only ruins a trip if you don’t have a spare, the tools and the knowledge required to fix it. For most, the actual solution is to call AAA or in this case, get a third-party systems integrator (SI). Calling an SI to help solve an unforeseen problem is not a bad idea, but it does come with a hefty price tag and a level of dependency that doesn’t mirror the model of moving to a public cloud.

    With the right solutions in place, even a pandemic like COVID-19 should not disrupt your business. Every IT leader should have confidence in their infrastructure systems. That said, it takes time and effort to get there, and no journey worth taking is easy. Having integrated solutions and partners are critical to the hybrid cloud journey. And so is knowing when to fix it yourself and when to call in support to save you millions.

    Too Much Luggage From the DBAs

    Packing the back of the family Ford “Wagon Queen Family Truckster” is a special skill set. It’s like playing Tetris with your family’s luggage. Right-sizing infrastructure capacity while supporting applications is like making sure all the luggage fits in the car and that you still have room to move your feet. Sure, you could buy a bigger car to manage the payload, but the expense doesn’t justify the performance. You need the clarity to act across your private and public cloud infrastructure in a single solution without disruption is required. That level of optimization is a constant to remaining competitive, enabling you to transform your infrastructure from being seen as a cost of business to being recognized as a revenue generator.

    Compliance Just Gave You a Speeding Ticket

    No matter how well-intentioned and on the right side of the law your compliance team is, it can feel like you are being chased by Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane. And while you don’t mean any harm, the law is the law. In the rush to the cloud, you’re not often asked how you will manage the migration, you’re simply asked how fast you can move—reminiscent of another epic journey: “We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there.” Regardless of whether you identify with Smokey or the Bandit, you cannot deny that Sheriff Buford T. Justice (aka, Compliance/Security Officer) will slow you down. So, work early and often with your compliance team to ensure that where you store your data and who has access to your data always remains in compliance.

    Leadership Just Ran Out of Gas on the Migration Budget …

    … and now they want to know when the cost of running applications is best on-premises versus across the public clouds? Don’t break out your abacus just yet. Cost is all about transparency to the needs of the application infrastructure. Too many enterprises are finding that the rush to the cloud was expensive and not well-planned and are shifting critical apps back to the private infrastructure. But you need to go beyond just resourcing noisy neighbors with VM automation. A long-term solution is to optimize the application performance with an integrated APM and infrastructure solution. A more immediate and tactical solution is to leverage a hybrid infrastructure platform that works across multiple on-premises vendors and public cloud vendors to give you the cost analysis you need.

    Application Managers Are Fighting Over the Music  

    On-premises versus public cloud, VMs versus containers, AWS versus Google versus Azure. Where should those applications be running and how can they migrate them? These may seem like the most trivial of issues to be concerned about, but DevOps, architects and managers have deep loyalties way beyond rational factors such as cost, performance and control. Having the ability to manage and plan cost across a multi-vendor hybrid infrastructure to maintain your performance SLAs is critical. Don’t let blind loyalty or the loudest voice control your path. Your hybrid optimization platform should afford you real-time planning and cloud brokerage to ensure you are optimized for cost and performance.

    Your Early Talent Team Has Been Doing the Same TikTok Dance in the Backseat for the Past 8 Hours

    Hearing the same story about why the journey is behind schedule or the same ask for more budget to meet performance SLAs, or even a repeated request to deviate from the existing road map, can wear you down or dilute your focus. It’s important to have a multi-department/cross-functional plan and mapped roles and to measure performance. Keeping the entire team (multiple owners of the “cloud” in a large enterprise) engaged and on the same plan to avoid going into a loop of burned resources and nerves.

    Are We There Yet?

    As with most family trips to magical destinations, the road to a successful cloud migration is fraught with unexpected disruptions—but a good plan can avoid most common challenges. So, no matter what stage you might be at in your hybrid cloud journey, we hope you will reach out to us before you feel the need to pull over when the going gets tough.

    Hope you are all happy and healthy. Please, during this increased time of need, remember to give back to your community as you can.