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.
