The business landscape is changing. Many organizations now have remote workers, multiple offices, and numerous tools and platforms.
While these changes bring greater opportunities, they also introduce new challenges for business leaders, especially IT departments struggling to keep pace and drive effective collaboration and communication.
Migrating and operating in the cloud has many benefits for organizations, including:
• Increased efficiency in operations and management
• Better support and access for a distributed workforce
• Integration with the IT tech stack
• Reduced costs
However, even as many businesses rush to adopt cloud computing processes, it is not an easy initiative, it can be expensive and the migration process can be a drain on critical IT resources. But companies can keep costs low and make sure their team is working efficiently by implementing some key strategies.
Focus on planning
Preparation is your greatest ally. A well-laid plan will help you manage the scope of the project as well as the level of disruption to the business.
Carefully examine your business objectives and requirements, the current state of your IT operations, and the cloud options available. This evaluation and analysis will help you identify potential issues, opportunities, and needs that you can then prepare for.
Codify rules based on your priorities
Establish a custom rules engine to identify priorities for migration, then automate segmentation of applications based on the defined criteria, creating groups of applications to move together in order of specified priorities. Since a careful analysis of all influencing factors for each application involves considerable effort, the ability to customize, modify, and re-evaluate the assessment process is essential. For example, the future state of each application will have an impact on its architecture, related technical dimensions, and the impact to ongoing business operations and processes. And let’s not forget that migrating an application may introduce significant implications with regards to data security and privacy issues. Along with this, legal regulations in the cloud are changing too. All those aspects have to be considered as part of the assessment process.
Once the assessment is done, rules are established for each application which speed up decisions and wave scheduling. The rules engine also enables the examination and interrogation of every application to quickly identify which meet your defined criteria and business priorities and determine those that are ready to be rehosted or replatformed. Whether your criteria are based on costs, security, complexity or alignment with specific business plans, each application can be codified and segmented accordingly.
Know the ins and outs of your IT estate
For an efficient migration to move forward without disruption to the organization, a comprehensive analysis of every application across the entire portfolio must be done. Each application must be evaluated in the context of what the organization considers a priority – be it how easy it is to move them to the cloud, what costs would be involved and how the transformation impacts the IT infrastructure and/or your business.
Leverage automation to drive efficiency
To make the best use of your team it’s vital to automate the gathering of only the data you need for your project and tie the necessary business factors to each application, which means you can build the rules for how to handle each application from end to end and automate at scale. The results: a faster process which blends human intelligence with powerful automation and reduces both risk and cost. Admins should be easily able to adapt simple PowerShell integration scripts and reusable templates to map even the most complex workflow. This powerful orchestration accelerates the migration process, while reducing the time and inefficiencies historically required of application owners and highly skilled engineers to set up and monitor tasks and events..
Here’s how we do it
Our migration team gains great efficiencies by leveraging our TransitionManager platform. It integrates with your existing tools to uncover and aggregate the data within your organization. With a complete picture of not only your applications and workloads but their relationships, locations, owners, and dependencies, we can quickly work with customer teams to decide how where and when to move.
TransitionManager accelerates the transport process, too. While transport tools allow for quick automated movement of apps and workloads, they also must be configured in specific apps that are moving must be designated. This configuration for each tool in the target environment is time-consuming and difficult to coordinate. With TransitionManager you can orchestrate both the human and automated tasks while leveraging multiple tools.
Set up of the configuration data is passed to tools along with the precise sequence of appropriate steps. So, the right apps get to the right location using the correct tool. And best of all this means your highly skilled team members are free from tedious and error-prone manual setup and validation steps.