How do you manage the costs and risks of cloud migration and deployment?

Before embarking on cloud migration and deployment, it's crucial to have a clear vision of your business objectives, priorities, and requirements. Ask yourself how the cloud can help you achieve these goals and what the expected benefits and costs are. Consider how you will measure the success of your migration and deployment efforts. By answering these questions, you can define the scope, budget, and timeline of your project. Additionally, determine the most suitable cloud service model (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS) and provider based on your specific needs. Having a well-defined strategy will ensure a smoother and more successful transition to the cloud.

Begin by conducting a thorough assessment of your current infrastructure, applications, and business goals. Identify which workloads are suitable for the cloud and establish clear objectives for migration and deployment, such as scalability, cost savings, or improved performance.

Based on your assessment, determine the most appropriate migration method, whether it's a lift-and-shift approach or a more comprehensive re-architecture. Consider the level of disruption, time, and resources required for each method, ensuring it aligns with your goals and minimizes risks.

For migrating and deploying workloads to the cloud, you can choose different methods based on your current infrastructure and workload complexity. One approach is the lift-and-shift method, where you move your applications and data to the cloud without significant modifications. It's a faster and more cost-effective option, but it may not fully exploit the cloud's capabilities. Another approach is the refactor or rearchitect method, involving modifying or rebuilding applications to optimize them for the cloud. While this approach is more time-consuming and expensive, it can enhance performance, scalability, and security. Consider the trade-offs and select the migration method that aligns best with your specific needs and goals.

Follow industry best practices and leverage migration and deployment tools to streamline the process. Automated tools can help with workload discovery, migration planning, and tracking progress, ensuring a smoother transition with minimal disruption.

The biggest problem during deployment and implementation is the use of the wrong tools that don't work well together and the poor documentation by the manufacturers of apps and cloud platforms and third party tools. This has been my experience. Is that on the outside? These components will say that its easy to their stuff and work well together and the documentation is all good but when you actually have a look at everything they have in reality the bubble is popped. So it is important to do test runs and do thorough preparation & research of all the tools and apps and cloud platforms to make sure that when the live migration begins all the data and the services and apps that there are no major delays which can cost the business severely.

To ensure a smooth migration and deployment process, start by conducting a thorough analysis of your existing applications and data to identify dependencies and risks. Create a detailed plan with clear roles and milestones, and leverage cloud migration tools like AWS Migration Hub or Azure Migrate. Test your workloads in a sandbox environment to ensure functionality and compatibility. Once deployed, monitor and optimize your workloads using cloud-native tools such as CloudWatch or third-party solutions like Datadog. By following these steps, you can achieve a seamless transition to the cloud, minimizing disruptions and maximizing the benefits of your cloud environment.

Prioritize security measures to protect your cloud-based workloads. Implement robust access controls, encryption, and monitoring systems. Regularly back up your data to prevent loss and ensure business continuity in the event of an incident.

Always make sure you have a viable exit strategy to maintain defensive leverage against unwarranted or unreasonable price escalation or change in strategic direction of your providers and partners.

Continuously monitor and optimize your cloud costs to ensure efficiency. Utilize cost management tools to track expenses, identify areas of overspending, and optimize resource allocation. Implement automation and scaling mechanisms to optimize resource utilization and maximize cost-effectiveness.

Cloud costs are only as good as the governance and training provided to employees on the relevant public cloud provider. Taking advantage of reserved instances for workloads that won’t change in the next 1, 3, or even 5 years can further help reduce costs, but ultimately cloud spend is only as good as the business strategy behind the reason for moving to the cloud. There’s no silver bullet to better cloud spend, it’s a mixture of people, processes, and technology.

I would say from my experience setting a concrete budget on a migration is unrealistic. Perhaps setting a budget and estimating is good. But then set aside emergency and additional funding that does not have an allocation. Call it "migration reserve funding" for those complications and extra time required. The company that is involved in migrating and deploying needs to be closely monitored to make sure they don't blow out the budget with promises that they don't deliver. I have seen time and time again deployment and migration providers promising a lot of things in sales conversations but severely cost blowing out sometimes doubling or tripling the actual cost of the migration. As a client be wary. Add that to the contract.

It’s important to make an honest unbiased assessment to ascertain if moving to the cloud is a need or if you’re doing it because “everyone else is”. There are plenty of good reasons for not moving everything to the cloud. At my old company we were looking at a different video conferencing product than we had been using. Between the cost and the added security risks, the decision was made to host on-prem. With the company wide push to the cloud it wasn’t easy to get the executive buy-in. Being prepared and having worked each scenario made the presentation run smoother. In the end it was approved and was 100% the right decision. The very next project, webcasting, was a cloud migration as it was the best option. It’s great to have options!

Once you've determined your potential workloads and weighed the risks of moving, consider the existing relationships you may have today with the cloud providers such as Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle or IBM when reviewing your workloads. There can be advantages to utilizing a provider you have an existing relationship with, or using that relationship status as enticement for a new provider. Decisions can also vary by workload, one cloud provider may not meet all the needs of your organization and/or you may have needs to manage services on multiple for your customer needs. Don't forget, its often cheaper to move data into the cloud than out of one, doing your diligence in advance can save you time and money.