Build your cloud strategy: part 2 — Cloud Vision
Introduction
The first article was about the characteristics and needs of an organization and the attributes of cloud deployment make planning a cloud migration easier. So we presented the Separation of Responsibilities in the Azure Model and the Types of Cloud Services but we need to understand that every company considering the move to the cloud a part of their innovation and digital transformation plans. Because migration becomes hard if you don’t build any strategy, so we discussed in the previous article Migration Analysis based on ADM and TOGAF.
In this article, we will describe what we need to be more prepared to succeed in this migration and feedback, you use this Guidance Framework as a support for what to do.
Is it a Cloud migration or Cloud Adoption?
This question is really important because before talking about the cloud, any organization should understand that we need to change the way of work of every employee, thinking in automation, Agility, DevOps, internal process, legacy, security, data confidentiality, and governance.
Basic steps to be done before the migration
1- Form a Cloud Team and attribute roles
This team is composed of enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders, it is like a committee that will work on this big transformation from the analysis until the setup and implementation of all strategies defined.
They start evaluating the use of SaaS services in public cloud, after PaaS Services, for some cases lift and ship is the unique solution but according to the environment and application, they can decide to keep them on-premises for some reason.
Many organizations have workforces in specialized knowledge and skills developed over years in specific custom legacy systems or platforms or technology used or configuration even this expertise can increase along time because it is outdated or the specific business or functional domain changes or not be the same. But, these skills are important to be able to define the same result after migration. So, they have to contribute, they can be network engineers, system administrators, and operators, capacity planners, analysts, developers, quality assurance (QA) engineers, database administrators, and architects or data storage and security specialists, Business and functional architects, and many more.
When all members are selected, a Cloud Leader or a Product Owner, if we use Scrum and agility inside the organization, should attribute specific roles according to their task to do in Cloud Strategy.
2-Understand your infrastructure
After transforming the IT organization to build a new structure dedicated to cloud strategies and analysis, defining their roles during the first step before defining the foundation team, with outlined objectives and key metrics, they should start by organization’s infrastructure, all members work together with IT team to define all characteristics, for example, number of servers, number of VMs, storages, OS, capacities, percent of use in hour or day, specific configuration to consider, licenses installed, other technologies and any details is important to choose the best cloud model: IaaS or PaaS or SaaS.
3- Coupling and links between applications and databases
We know that application can be cloned in multiple servers to ensure that it is available always, and in this step, we need to consolidate the work in order to define the links between all applications, the global exist plan will define a priority plan before moving to the cloud.
4- Directive: “Move some applications to the cloud.”
After defining the priority, all members should study the data compliance and confidentiality, the technology used, to decide if we are able to move it without a change or load shedding for a redesign.
Five R Strategies for Migrating Applications to the Cloud
Because everything is around the applications, the choice on the strategy will depend on the migration way, we are talking here about the 5 R.
Technical profesionnals inside the company have to prepare an exist plan for every application, and the need to decide if they will work on all application even if they can’t be integrated in the cloud or select the application that they have to start a strategy.
The application can be:
- Rehosted : lift and shift and extend strategy without any change
- Refactored or ReArchitected: we need to plan many changes in the application according to the cloud patterns, and re-imagine more solutions.
- Revised Or RePlatformed : lift-tinker-and-shift intoduced by Amazon AWS
- Rebuilt: we need to discard legacy application and develop again using cloud services and features, it requires good mastery of fucntional and technical concept, a familiarity with existing application and business processes as well as cloud services.
- Replaced or RePurchase: it means that we will use a SaaS soltuon instead of current application.
5- Build a draft of vision architecture for some candidates
Choose very well you application needs to be tested, we can select an easy case where it’s not complicated to work on its vision, and a coupled case to understand the risk and issues, so, it is easy to start thinking on solutions and they can be as references to be used in other application.
6- Start experiment using Test provider offers to decide
After defining your strategy, you need to choose some providers to start some experiment, every provider can offer a Test service like DevTest lab in Microsoft Azure where you can use cloud services and verify the feasibility and anticipate problems in advance.
Prepare and plan a change in roles inside the organization after migration
It is really important to prepare Human Resource strategy, maybe, when you finish working on migration Roadmap, you need to include new organization with specific roles that gather old skills across jobs taking into consideration later talent development in terms of new roles related to the cloud jobs (architect or integrator), it is similar to move from manual tasks toward more fulfilling ones to adapt the automation, it is better than supplying more resources.
MultiCloud Adoption
One of the solution to prevent malicious and insider threats while in use in a hybrid cloud as a strategy, using Multicloud architecture can be a good fit for some organization, especially, if your application is designed using Microservices patterns, this will be interesting to minimize the latency of your services and databases deployed.
Conclusion
Cloud migrate is an opportunity for change to every organization because it is not about moving to the cloud, it is about reorganizing works, putting in place new processes, new challenges to reach and more revenue, scalability, resilience, and dependency-aware. Changes will be easy, employee focus on improving product development. Planning your strategy can take more time than estimated but it’s better than failing and coming back to on-premises architectures because thus far, modernization efforts have failed to generate the desired and expected benefits for some companies.
Advice : Go far, test and fail to learn , share your experiment better than designing and estimating after you move to the action where you discover many surprises so you wait all your migration.
