Although a number of enterprises have taken the steps to start migrating a number of their workloads to the cloud, concerns still abound across a number of organizations (both at higher and middle levels) related to migrating to the cloud. Sometimes this also causes a rift between senior and middle management due to disagreements on the pace of the cloud migration. Getting increasingly impatient to reap the fruits of business agility, senior management for example may get frustrated with middle management not acting fast enough to cloud enable the enterprise’s IT infrastructure, while middle management may not be satisfied with the lack of executive commitment by not allocating enough funding and resources that can help make that transition.
To help get over any concerns related to cloud migration or to increase the pace of migrations, the enterprise (and all of its LOBs) should translate the benefits of migrating to the cloud to specific business outcomes related to their own organizations. Such an exercise will motivate them to make that transition and / or accelerate the pace toward cloud migration. (PgMP Book Download)
Benefits / Advantages of Cloud Migrations
In summary, the benefits of cloud migration are the following that can be used to perform a feasibility study specific to an enterprise’s cases.
- Scalability – Cloud environments address IT’s scalability concerns by providing an elastic computing model where additional compute and storage resources can be allocated temporarily during high demand business scenarios. Application workloads, therefore, can be spread across multiple servers and computing environments.
- Infrastructure Cost savings – By moving from a capital (CapEx) expenditure model to an operating expenditure (OpEx) model (pay as you go), enterprises can reap major financial benefits by trimming a large portion of their IT budgets related to CapEx. Depending on the application workloads that one migrates, one can save in storage costs, servers, system administration and in other infrastructure costs.
- Technical delivery agility – One of the advantages that cloud offers to the IT staff is in the areas of systems delivery. A cloud environment, for example, allows IT staff as well as business users to rapidly provision environments, test new technologies, deploy underlying platforms and development environments, and so on. This dramatically reduces time associated with the development and delivery of systems and in experimenting with new innovations.
- Reduced Operational Complexity – By having an external service provider responsible for the IT infrastructure, platform and applications, enterprises enjoy reduced operational complexity related to running their IT systems thus enabling them to focus on running their businesses instead.
- Enable mobility solutions for internal employees and customers – Cloud environments provide a stable environment for most end consumer related mobility solutions in which demand can spike during certain periods requiring temporary allocation of compute and other resources.
- Enables the building of business ecosystems – One of the characteristics of the digital economy is that of business ecosystems, where businesses in an industry or across industries connect through digital platforms and business processes to share information and transactions. Clouds enable the building of those environments with ease by providing standardized integrations.
- Better opportunities to use data analytics – Traditional data analytics solutions were expensive and complex to implement inhibiting enterprises to pursue data analytics initiatives. However, as many CSPs provide such complex environments on an as needed basis, more enterprises are making use of those solutions to advance their business interests.
- A technical ecosystem – Cloud service providers usually provide a complete ecosystem of technical services. This can free up businesses to instead focus on delivery of solutions rather than worrying about the underlying details related to installations, configurations, maintenance, etc.
- Access to a modern infrastructure – To strengthen and maintain their competitive positioning, CSPs try to stay in line with new technologies and offer them to their customers. This allows enterprise IT to have access to modern infrastructure and technologies without having to invest large capital.
- Automation – The CSPs business model is based on deploying and running an efficient IT infrastructure, they are constantly tweaking and configuring to optimize and automate the environment that results in fewer errors and lower costs associated with the underlying infrastructure. Enterprise customers therefore gain various operational efficiencies from running in such environments without having to invest on such initiatives in their own data centers.
The reduced costs, ease of access to new IT environments and technologies, and reduced operational complexity allows businesses to become more innovative and offer solutions faster bringing the dreams of business agility closer than ever before. However, many organizations also have concerns that stall them to make that move to the cloud. Similar to the exercise above, sometimes addressing these problems head on and seeing their specific relevance to your organization can help alleviate those concerns.
Cloud Migration Concerns
Some of the common concerns include:
- Lack of Skills – One of the challenges that organizations face has to do with lack of skills in-house that can help them to assess the feasibility of transitioning to the cloud and to lead the transformation.
- Legacy systems integration – Integration of newer technologies and systems with legacy systems can pose a challenge. However, most vendors are now offering cloud enabled environments for their solutions and migration toolkits and adapters to ease in transition. Looking into the specifics can ease those concerns.
- General complexity with migrations – A large number of enterprises have undergone complex cloud migrations and the market in general has the resources and service providers that can help in those migrations.
- Security and privacy concerns – Although moving to a cloud environment does pose some risk, most CSPs offer iron clad security environments for their customers. The large number of customers on the CSP’s infrastructure drives them to comply with latest security standards and government regulations.
- Concerns over the resulting unused IT hardware – Many enterprises worry about the resulting unused IT hardware. However, with careful planning such hardware can be put to other uses or in some cases can be sold in the large market of unused hardware.
In most cases, the general concerns can be addressed by looking at the specifics of each environment. As most of the industry is moving towards the cloud, chances are that those concerns are usually addressed elsewhere.
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