When it comes to cloud migration, there’s a lot to consider – which workloads should be migrated, how much storage space is needed, which cloud provider is best for your workloads, not to mention how much it will cost. But the biggest mistake that organizations can make when migrating to the cloud is not asking these questions or taking time to properly plan. 

Poor planning is causing organizations to rethink their cloud strategy altogether and realign their business goals to their cloud migration efforts. But a solid cloud platform can help organizations see around corners by providing intelligent observability into what workloads to migrate, how to migrate them, and how to avoid unexpected costs. Along with implementing the right cloud solution, there are four simple steps organizations can take to ensure a smooth migration to the cloud.

Four Steps to a Smooth Cloud Migration

To successfully reduce cloud migration complexity, right-size cloud configurations, and validate cloud performance, there’s a clear four-phase process that gives organizations an upper hand.

1. Discovery: Discover workload characteristics and identify dependencies between compute, network, and storage elements. During the discovery phase, the migration team should identify business objectives, application portfolio, and targeted workloads. Once the targeted workloads are identified, it’s important to use a platform that will discover the inventory that makes up the workloads and all their interdependencies.
2. Profiling: Distillation of hundreds or thousands of workloads into a small set of representative synthetic workloads that accurately characterize performance. Once the inventory and dependencies have been captured, the migration teams need to measure the workload’s utilization and performance characteristics. The information they collect during the discovery phase will be helpful in streamlining this process.
3. Playback: Accurate playback of representative synthetic workloads in the cloud to select cost-optimal configurations without compromising workload performance. Here, the migration team should conduct a baseline assessment to understand the health, utilization, and performance aspects of the application’s on-premises infrastructure. This exercise will serve as the reference point for comparing the cloud’s utilization and performance, and identifying potential issues that should be addressed before migration.
4. Monitor: Monitor actual workloads post-migration to the cloud to identify any performance or capacity issues.

At face value, these steps can seem overwhelming, but a lack of adequate planning is the biggest mistake organizations can make when migrating to the cloud. Poor planning is often the root of all the other cloud migration issues companies experience, including:

• Doing a straight “lift-and-shift” instead of utilizing intelligent move groups based on application and resource dependencies. It’s important for organizations to prioritize applications based on business requirements to avoid wasting unnecessary time, money, and resources. Furthermore, ensure the workloads slated for cloud migration are truly fit for cloud deployment, because sometimes certain applications work better on-premises. And when it comes to the dependencies of apps and workloads, keep in mind that highly dependent applications should be migrated together to avoid disruptions.

• Moving workloads without simulating workload cost and performance in comparison with other options available to the organization. Instead, collect various data and metrics before migrating in order to compare right-sized costs across clouds to find the most efficient configurations based on risk, performance, and consumption. By analyzing these metrics, the right data will reveal on-premises workload behavior – both over time and during peak business hours – and signal what resources and how much capacity is needed once in the cloud. 

• Not having a strategy or goal in mind for the migration, thereby not having a method to measure the success (or failure) of the migration. Even before the discovery phase mentioned above, companies must get organized internally. And it starts with forming a team, assigning roles and objectives, and building a roadmap for migration along with goals and KPIs to measure at different points in the process. This helps organizations stay organized and in control of the cloud migration, as well as provides clear visibility into each phase, giving them the best chance of a successful migration.

This poor planning – or lack thereof – is causing some organizations to rethink their cloud strategy altogether. These organizations moved to the cloud because they were told it would help them be more agile or strategic, but they went without having a clear strategy as to how they would leverage the power of the cloud to accelerate their business objectives. In short, the connection between their business goals and their cloud migration efforts wasn’t there. Situations like that can lead to lost productivity (which is expensive), lack of confidence in the company’s strategic vision, confused or even frustrated customers, and lost competitive positioning in the market.

Conclusion

Properly planning for cloud migration and implementing the right cloud management tool or platform to aid in that planning can bring visibility across an organization’s workloads, help manage the migration process properly, migrate workloads with little to no disruption to application performance, and, arguably most importantly, ensure you avoid unexpected cost increases or performance degradation.