Optimise Your Move To The Cloud5 steps for business transformationAn ebook from Rackspace and EMC

THINKING ABOUT MOVING APPLICATIONS TO THE CLOUD?

That makes sense. It’s a powerful IT delivery model that offers all the speed, agility and scalability that traditional IT often lacks.

But too many organisations are missing a trick on the road to cloud because they don’t take the chance to transform their technical infrastructure for efficiency, alignment, integration and excellence.

At Rackspace and EMC, we’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands, of cloud deployments and migration projects – and we know the best projects are the ones that start with the clearest strategic goals.

So we thought we’d share a quick summary of our five-step cloud migration methodology, starting with the crucial strategy phase.

The idea is simple: do it right and you take the risk, cost and delay out of your migration projects. And you get there faster, at lower cost and in great shape to transform your business moving forward.

We help companies of all sizes do this every day. But this isn’t a sales pitch for our consulting services (which you’d be crazy not to at least consider). It’s simply a solid way of thinking about your journey to the cloud.

Introduction

K YOURSELF AND YOUR TEAM EXACTLY WHAT THEY HOPE TO GAIN FROM A CLOUD DEPLOYMENT:

Five Steps to the CloudThe smart way to migrate applications

STRATEGY DISCOVERY DESIGN TRANSITION

OPTIMISATION

TRANSFORMATION

A lot of businesses start moving into the cloud before they truly understand both the opportunity and risks for the project.

Your strategy will dictate the success of your initial cloud transition and your subsequent ability to drive business change.

It sounds too basic to mention, but establishing clear goals up front – and getting the business aligned around them – is the single most important step in understanding your application portfolio and what you can do to make it work harder for you.

ASK YOURSELF AND YOUR TEAM EXACTLY WHAT THEY HOPE TO GAIN FROM A CLOUD DEPLOYMENT:

If it’s straight cost efficiency – which costs and by how much?

If it’s delivering business alignment – which business metrics are you promising to drive forward?

If it’s for operational excellence – what should you outsource or buy ‘as-a-service’: monitor, backup, database?

If it’s for integrated development and operations – how can you build agility and speed to scale and react to spikes?

If it’s to solve a chronic (or acute) app problem – outline the precise nature of the problem and how cloud will help solve it.

Whatever you hope to accomplish, make sure everyone on the team is aiming at the same target. You’d be amazed how often the seeds of failure are sown here.

It makes sense to start your cloud journey with some quick wins – anything from backup, monitoring and disaster recovery to new applications, development and testing. Then you’ve established a process and path for the harder, more complex projects.

Once goals are clear, the strategy to get there tends to be a lot easier.

Action Points

Clarify goals on paper – Everything starts here. Write down and share your tactical and strategic objectives for a managed move to the cloud.

Get buy-in – Strong executive sponsorship goes a long way when you’re changing the way you deliver IT. A proof of concept (POC) environment can often be an excellent way of demonstrating benefits to the business and earning exec sponsorship – as well as bedding down best-practice for deploying and testing apps within the cloud.

Think culture – Cloud makes an impact on your IT culture. Think about the change from development and operational siloes to a DevOps model.

Get your opex hat on – Cloud minimises capex in favour of predictable opex. Make sure your budgeting can pivot for that.

Step 1

Strategy

No one moves everything into the cloud at once (nor should they).

THE DISCOVERY PHASE IS ALL ABOUT TAKING STOCK OF WHAT YOU HAVE NOW SO YOU CAN MAKE BETTER MIGRATION DECISIONS. THIS INCLUDES:

Your applications – which are a good fit for cloud and which aren’t?

Your licenses – do they allow for cloud deployment?

Your data – where is it and how will your apps access it?

Your users – where are they and what are their demands?

Your dependencies – what relies on what?

A detailed knowledge of your app estate and its ecosystem is an enormous advantage for any cloud migration program – even if you only intended to move one app for starters.

Action Points

Survey your estate – Understand and document your application requirements and interdependencies. Automated discovery tools can help.

Prioritise your cloud candidates – Look for quick wins before attempting to migrate your mission-critical apps. Consider moving static website content to the cloud and publishing via CDN, or target specific environments such as disaster recovery or Dev and Test.

Do your licensing homework – If you’re moving or integrating with commercial software, some form of Software Asset Management will help here – but the ‘tribal knowledge’ of stakeholders and involvement of your vendors are key, too.

Get close to your users – the better you understand their needs, the less your helpdesk will light up later. Discovery should account for about half your efforts in this phase.

Step 2

Discovery

Designing the right delivery solution for your strategy sounds pretty simple. But in truth, there are many flavours of cloud deployment and, for the vast majority of companies, a hybrid solution is almost always right – and less risky.

Cloud purists may not like to admit it, but for most deployments the best strategy is not “one size fits all”. Different applications have different requirements.

THE BEST WAY FORWARD IS OFTEN TO COMBINE A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT APPROACHES, INCLUDING:

Public cloud – the pay-as-you-go ‘utility’ model everyone thinks of when they think cloud.

Private cloud – run from your own data centres.

Hosted – A managed service in a third-party data centre.

On-premise – traditional IT on hardware and software that you maintain.

The combination you choose for your own application depends on a lot of different factors, including budget, uptime demands, sensitivity to latency, security, compliance, scalability and your existing infrastructure.

By investing time in Discovery (and analysing the results) you’ll understand each application’s individual requirements and set yourself up for success.

There’s a lot of skill in turning your strategy and goals into designs that make sense. And it’s essential to know the strengths and weaknesses of each deployment model for each application.

Action Points

Open your mind – Success in the cloud isn’t about all-or-nothing solutions. In many cases, a hybrid design makes sense.

Play to the strengths of each model – ‘Own the base and rent the spikes’ is a perfect example.

Think Agile – That’s what cloud is all about. Consider the future now to make it easy to provision for it later.

Build portability in up front – Users don’t want their data stuck in a proprietary service or behind a cloud API that’s not open.

Consider support – You don’t have to go it alone – but you do have to think about how you’ll support your deployment (and who will help).

Step 3

DesignYou may discover that it makes sense to keep part of your data hosted closer to home; for example, sensitive customer or legal information that is required to be stored within a particular jurisdiction.

A cloud transition is a key step. Getting there in great shape means knowing the ins and outs of the application and specific techniques to make it work in the clouds – from auto-scaling and instances to considerations about the environment.

The goal is to make the transition to a managed environment as streamlined as possible.

BUT FAR TOO OFTEN, TRANSITIONS GO OVER-BUDGET, AND IT’S USUALLY FOR ONE OF TWO REASONS:

Lack of pragmatism – expecting the ‘techies’ to solve all problems by magic; trying for a Big Bang transition instead of step-by-step; misunderstanding dependencies…

No executive sponsor – leaving the transition team to negotiate with all stakeholders without a power base.

Transition issues are generally not technical. They tend to be about planning and process. And the right answer is usually about a simple start, a clear road map and small iterations.

It’s important to create a step-by-step transition program to take you from where you are to where you’re going, taking into account:

Downtime and disruption – think about minimising it up front or you pay later.

Application dependencies – which applications need to be moved together?

Data migration – how and where will you move your data?

Cloud features – what cloud features can be used to make life easier – can you build a single server image and deploy from it multiple times?

Security issues – are there any windows of vulnerability?

User management – don’t underestimate the need for hand-holding and managing expectations.

A perfect strategy and design can still fall aprt if you aren’t actively managing these things.

Action Points

Actively manage your migration – Write down each migration step and expose any assumptions. Everybody involved should know what they need to do beforehand. Good preparation makes migration a management exercise not a technical hurdle.

Testing – Hammer your test environment before you even think about going into production mode. And don’t forget to run user acceptance testing if you want success.

Over-communicate with users – Every move to the cloud has user impacts. Don’t underestimate them.

Make a rollback plan – A solid rollback plan is essential, giving you confidence when approaching each migration event and making sure you’re covered for every eventuality.

Step 4

Transition

You’ve gained an operational advantage through the first four steps. Now you’re ready to drive deep and far reaching changes from a truly managed environment.

Now it’s time to ramp it up. Real business transformation comes when you’ve optimised your entire IT infrastructure to make the best use of every delivery model.

Even the smallest cloud project should start with a consideration of the wider implications and long-term transformation. This is where your goals and strategy from the first step meet your entire organisational roadmap.

Consider how you can make your applications cloud-aware and benefit from automatic scaling and self-healing. Define high-level steps about where you want each application to be and start breaking these steps down into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Action Points

Capture your learning – Every cloud deployment and migration is an opportunity to increase the knowledge in your team. Don’t squander it. Capture it.

Sell the vision – Show key stakeholders where you’re taking the business, why and what good looks like. Use your first case as a proof point.

Don’t rush! – IT teams who catch the cloud bug sometimes go from one small deployment to a global rollout in a single step. Not a good idea. Small, considered steps that follow the 5-step methodology are what works.

Always look for new opportunities – As you learn, look for other opportunities to benefit from cloud. With experience, more possibilities always emerge.

Don’t cram a square peg into a round hole –.Don’t deploy cloud for cloud’s sake. Some applications just aren’t a good fit. Take a hybrid approach for these apps and benefit from the right delivery mechanism for every situation.

Step 5

Transformation

The cloud is the most exciting and most transformative thing to hit IT since the transistor.

But with all the hype and hyperbole, too many IT departments are rushing into the cloud without thinking about the opportunity in front of them

The 5-step process outlined here is just common sense practice, applied to the cloud in all its hybrid flavours. It may seem obvious or elementary but we’ve seen far too many migrations wasted because one or more of these steps were skipped or rushed

Take it one step at a time and you’ll arrive in great shape and realise all the promise and potential that the cloud offers. Rush headlong into the unknown and your chance of stumbling increases dramatically.

Happy transforming!

Keen to learn more?

Check out our Advisory Services and let’s chat about how we can turn your cloud journey into a fully managed, business transformation process.

Conclusion

The Rackspace/EMC team helps organisations of all sizes on their journeys to the cloud.

Our Advisory Services and Consulting teams stand ready to help you.

We’re kind of fanatical that way.

So learn a bit more and get in touch http://www.rackspace.co.uk/EMC

More Cloud Resources

eBook: The Disruptive Cloud: How cloud platforms change innovation dynamics

SlideShare: Spikes: Why scaling platforms with cloud is the secret to customer success

eBook: Web Experts: Learn why cloud remains the technology for 2014

SlideShare: The Power of the Hybrid Cloud: A cautionary tale for IT folks and innovators

Share

Further Resources

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Google Plus