How to accelerate your cloud journey in three stages

For businesses, the journey to the cloud can be equally daunting. Many companies struggle to overcome the barriers to cloud migration. The vast choice of potential solutions and the extent of a firm’s IT estate can make even knowing how or where to start difficult.

This can be compounded by an abundance of outdated on-premises legacy systems that a company is reluctant to retire or move away from. Often essential to business continuity, the existence of monolithic systems can instill an “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality.

None of this is helped by a lack of knowledge – most companies simply do not have the in-house skills or resources to undertake a business-wide migration. Some underestimate how complex it will be, while others, who are well aware of the complexities, become overwhelmed by the prospect. Recruiting skilled staff is equally challenging – in a strong employee market, the dwindling pool of talent is in high demand.

A journey in three stages

Staring these barriers in the face can be unnerving. But using the right approach and the right tools will make the journey far less arduous.

Breaking the process down into stages is not only sensible – it’s essential. The first of these will be the assessment phase – weighing up the options and approaches and deciding on the path to take and the tools to use. Once that’s decided then the preparation phase begins, planning the tasks, stakeholders, and timescales for the migration. And then the final phase: the migration itself.

Assessment

The first thing to do is to get a picture of what a successful cloud strategy will look like for a business. This will ideally encompass every part of the business; the migration should be based on the company’s objectives and goals. It’s also important to understand that the impact will be on the business units and the business as a whole.

The amounts of data collected at this stage can be huge, and it can be difficult to get a handle on the expanding amount of information pouring in. A solution such as our in-house Application Portfolio Assessment tool (eAPM) can greatly simplify this process. By using myriad data to take the temperature of a company’s IT performance and benchmark it – across industries, geographies, and IT organization sizes – eAPM allows an organization to dynamically visualize its IT.

Additionally, this approach brings improvements to IT performance as a whole by allowing an organization to understand the strengths and weaknesses of its portfolio. This then allows it to assign specific rationalization strategies throughout and identify low performance areas.

Preparation

Preparing for migration requires a robust approach. It is essential to develop a plan of attack, and to put in place a supervised migration roadmap. The important groundwork is done at this stage: a successfully executed migration is dependent on holistic and thorough preparation. This means controlling acceleration by eliminating waste at every step, enhancing automation, and ensuring a low impact on business operations.

It’s also important that control be retained, with the implementation of strong governance and reporting from start to finish. The processes need to be transparent, in order to govern and manage risks.

Migration

The actual migration itself will vary hugely from business to business, its nature dictated by an organization’s needs. For some, a lift and shift of the current application estate will be the favored approach, while others will choose a full transformation, utilizing the most recent DevOps and deployment techniques.

Whatever the migration type, it is important that it take place smoothly and efficiently, without impacting a business’s day-to-day operations. With the plans and roadmap in place, it’s vital at this stage that the right tools are being used. The challenges of the migration process can be streamlined by using our Cloud Migration Center. By utilizing migration SMEs, industrialization, and a fully automated, robotic tool chain, much of the migration testing can be streamlined.

Partnering for acceleration

Planning a day trip to the coast on a whim is something that everyone can do on their own. For a once-in-a-lifetime trip around the world, it makes more sense to speak to a travel agent.

Cloud migration is certainly more akin to the latter, a journey best taken with the help of experts who know the territory and speak the languages. Having the right partner makes that journey easier. Capgemini Cloud Platform (CCP) brings a vast range of features to the table to streamline a business’s transformation, from an advanced user portal to fully managed cloud and digital services that mean you can focus on your business strengths and outcomes.

CCP’s cloud workload migration lays out a strategic and clear-to-follow path to digital transformation. Our end-to-end methodology delivers apps migration to the cloud in all three phases, with an integrated, collaborative team of experts assisting at every stage – experts who are in turn supported by a highly automated migration factory, ensuring that the process is documented in detail.

Your business – your transformation

The ideal holiday varies from person to person. Someone who enjoys hiking the Norwegian fjords might not enjoy a week on a beach in the Bahamas, and vice-versa. But both holidays require assessment and planning before taking the cab to the airport and, during these stages, the goals for the holiday itself might change.

It’s the same with migration. Following an assessment, our team was able to highlight to a customer that they didn’t have the right internal sponsorship for their project, having omitted the onboarding and stakeholder engagement aspects of the project, resulting it coming to a near standstill. We were able to successfully get the project off the ground and provide a real transformative approach to it, as opposed to a lift and shift – as per the original planned migration.

With CCP, we will seek to align your migration to your business’s objectives and goals. The result might not be as thrilling as a summer getaway, but it will be every bit as rewarding.

For more information, feel free to get in touch with me on social media or download the Capgemini Cloud Platform brochure
https://www.capgemini.com/resources/capgemini-cloud-platform-brochure/