Recipe for a successful cloud transformation
Cloud transformation is becoming increasingly popular, fuelled by broad market consensus about the ability of the public cloud to address existing business and IT challenges.
Such challenges include: the need to decrease costs and optimise resources, a growing demand for digital services that requires improved capacity and scalability, and last but not least, enhanced agility to promptly respond to market demands.
In addition, public cloud offers significant opportunities for innovation and productivity increase, enabling your teams to focus their time on what is most important for the business and to evolve faster.
At GFT, we have strongly invested in cloud migration capabilities. Our experience shows us that for a cloud migration project to be successful, special attention should be paid to the following three elements:
1. Defining a clear end-to-end strategy
When migrating to the cloud, it is basic to define a cloud strategy (hybrid, multicloud…), to correctly prioritise new projects and legacy migrations, and to take into consideration not only the cost savings but also other benefits, such as the ability to deploy new business models. Changing to a software as a service (SaaS) and pay-per-use model, using agile methodologies and leveraging new technologies provided by the cloud, can be game changers.
Introducing KPIs brings transparency and helps realise the advantages of the cloud by quantifying the benefits achieved in innovation, productivity, agility and resiliency. It is also important to understand costs in detail – current, transformation and future costs – and to compare them against each other to define the application migration strategy. Review license agreements for software, hardware and data centres to understand if amendments of existing contracts are required and assess its cost implications.
Migration strategies can involve one, a few or all the following activities: refactoring, rehosting, replatforming, repurchasing and rearchitecting. These can be executed as a one-off or through a phased approach. Careful consideration is required to minimise future impact while also adapting to the available budget and internal support.
You might have to go through a few iterations to define the right plan for your organisation. Having the support of an experienced partner throughout this process will help you accelerate it while minimising risks.
2. Preparing the organisation for transformation
A cloud transformation initiative will impact your entire organisation. Understanding the cultural challenges and redefining the organisational structure to incorporate new roles and skills are critical to a successful cloud adoption journey. For instance, new tasks performed by FinOps specialists will be required to effectively manage costs on the cloud and the new operational model must factor this in.
All teams will need to introduce DevOps agile practices and the automation of infrastructure and applications deployments will increase the productivity of the organisation.
3. Ensuring continuous optimisation and innovation
Cloud offers multiple advantages but to make the best of it, you should keep an eye on infrastructure consumption to optimise the cost. Several tools allow you to monitor the expenditure and to understand where the gaps are in terms of optimisation.
Once on the cloud, innovation is relatively straightforward thanks to the resources offered by the cloud services providers, enabling you to easily embrace new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and big data to further develop your business. Proof of Concepts can be performed on demand with plenty of tools available to significantly accelerate innovation. In addition, the cloud enables you to reallocate resources previously dedicated to maintaining the infrastructure to more innovative tasks.
Talk to us if you are thinking about cloud migration. Our team has extensive experience on large scale migration projects worldwide and we have developed a specific methodology to help you accelerate your cloud transformation. Furthermore, our recent achievement of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration Competency status demonstrates our technical proficiency and proven customer success. Reach out to us for more details.
Read here or press release about our Amazon Web Services (AWS) certification “AWS Migration and DevOps Competencies”: gftglobal.com/3CUMkNB
