For large enterprises migrating to the cloud, there is an interesting gap between the art of the possible, migrating at pace in an automated way, and the harsh reality of dealing with a complex estate of applications and infrastructure and the associated controls.
Migrating an existing application from VMware to Cloud may well be a one-hour task, however, you end up with exactly what you have today, just hosted on someone else’s infrastructure. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t move the needle or your share price.
The technical art of the possible, whilst amazing, is a very small part of the puzzle that you need to solve to increase your pace of innovation, reduce cost and reduce risk.
To make material gains your estate becomes a portfolio of opportunities where decisions need to be made about the future of each application. When does it make sense to re-architect and re-platform? What steps are being taken to drive a new way of working to deliver faster to customers with less cost and risk? When is a lift and shift good enough, enabling on-premise infrastructure to be decommissioned? When do you make a buy versus build decision and initiate a project to change the approach completely?
The complexity of these challenges in isolation, for each application, is compounded when looking across thousands of interconnected applications and trying to allocate resources effectively.
Additionally, organizations will need strong governance around which cloud services pass muster. Controls around who can do what are also needed. A startup can be flexible and experiment across the whole team. A bank or Fortune 500 company can't.
We typically expect that the technical effort to migrate an application is less than 20% of the total organizational effort to execute a future cloud strategy. As with any technology enables transformation, the tech is rarely the hardest part.
Cutover is working alongside major cloud providers to help financial organizations effectively manage their migration to the cloud. To find out more, watch our data center migration video.
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About the author
Marcus Wildsmith
Formerly the Global Head of Telco and High Tech practice at a niche global consulting firm, Marcus has 15 years of experience with major launch transition projects including EE (the UK’s largest Telco) and the first UK 4G Services.