Cloud Migrations Take Time, Your Assessment Shouldn’t

Seventy-three (73%) percent of cloud migration assessments and projects are taking a year or longer to complete, according to a published survey. Ninety-six (96%) percent of the survey respondents reported that moving applications to the cloud was taking more time and money than they expected.  Sixty-two (62%) percent cited projects were harder than expected. This should not come as any shock, cloud migration assessments take time.

Those who have moved multiple times in their lifetime are aware of a universal truth.  You will receive the most accurate quote from movers that actually come and inspect your home in person, rather than those who just give general quotes over the phone or online.  While the theory of “lift and shift” sounds simple, there is so much that goes into a cloud migration. It’s not just the app have you have to lift up to the cloud, it is all of the underlying infrastructure and interdependencies that support the application as well.  When you move a family to another family, you take their habitat with them. When you migrate an application to the cloud, you are moving its ecosphere.

Assessing Your Potential Migration

In order to plan your migration journey, you need full visibility into your current environment.  Like a residential move, you will receive the most accurate cost estimate by attaining a service centric view of your environment.  An automated cloud migration assessment saves money in a number of ways.

• Like so many enterprises, you probably have servers, applications and resources that are no longer being used because they have simply been forgotten. These can simply be decommissioned, thus saving operational and licensing costs
• Part of the cloud migration assessment will be the evaluation of each application, as the benefits of migrating it are compared with its associated migration costs. Legacy applications that do not support cloud environments will either be retained on premise or retired.
• You can run assessments based on performance metrics to help right size your resource dependency infrastructure and not overprovision, which can be costly in a cloud OPEX model.
• Service mapping can provide deep understanding of application interdependencies that must be migrated at the same time in order to evade costly disruptions and troubleshooting.

Manual Cloud Migration Assessments are Lengthy

Najam Ahmad, Director of Network Engineering for Facebook, spoke at the Interop Conference back in 2013 and stated, “The days of managing networks through protocols and command-line interfaces are long gone … CLI is dead, it’s over.”  It is not just the CLI he was referring to, it is the manual approach to managing the network.  The necessity to automate enterprise management, provisioning and monitoring is a big reason why companies are migrating their workloads to the cloud.  There is no time for manual tasks and intervention today.  Gartner predicts that by 2020, more than 50 percent of current manual operational tasks will be replaced by intelligent automation services.

Companies need to extract maximum value and innovation from internal IT today in order to be competitive.  The last thing a company needs it for their IT talent to squander their time performing mundane tasks such as the configuration and updating of devices and infrastructure.  The same holds true for cloud migration assessments.  Imagine the time required to map the underlying application structure of 500 hundred servers or more.  Manual cloud migration assessments are prone to human error as well just like any manually dominated process.

Not All Cloud Migration Tools are Created Equal

There is no doubt that automated cloud migration tools provide real insights into your environment concerning the underlying blanket of interdependencies that support your application environments.  However, not all tools are created equal.   Some available tools only conduct infrastructure discovery providing only a partial picture.  This is like migrating the bones without cartilage.  Many tools are agent based which adds time and complexity to the process.  It is also important to note that affinity grouping is not the same as dependency mapping.  While affinity grouping does increase performance and minimize latency, it does not account for supporting resources and software dependencies.

Automated Service Mapping is Key

While most discovery tools on the market provide a basic infrastructure inventory, or application grouping, iQCloud brings a complete solution for any workload type at the service and application layer, down to all components that make up the compute stack of the application. We not only discover your infrastructure but through our unique automated service mapping capabilities discover entire services and their dependencies ranging from complex to legacy.  No agents or install files required,  just download the iQCloud virtual appliance and initiate discovery across your entire IT estate regardless of architecture.  Forget about the 3-6 month assessment process that is typically expected, learn how iQCloud discovery and assessment for cloud migration can accelerate your digital transformation today.