Building a Datacenter Exit Strategy

A focused IT Modernization program is one of the best ways to relieve the pressure of competing business needs. But suppose you are still running your corporate data center, your organization could be impeding their growth potential as most software vendors are shifting to license-based, cloud-only subscription models.

 Some of the challenges related to most corporate data centers:

?? Aging datacenters requiring significant improvements to align with new technology's drivers.

?? Multiple datacenters resulting from M&A (mergers and acquisitions) or periods of rapid growth.

?? Most legacy datacenters are considered general purpose only and only supports siloed resources scaling and limited application resiliency.

?? The total cost of ownership (Purchases, repairs, maintenance, upgrades, services, support, security, training, etc.) continues to increase while business outcomes are at risk.

The focus should be placed on the following modernization principles:

?? Simplify and optimize IT to reduce costs by eliminating the expense of operating your own datacenter. It can yield significant cost reductions while shifting from a CAPEX to an OPEX model.

?? Modernize applications and data to gain agility and insight.

?? Operate and secure hybrid cloud at scale to improve speed and reduce risk.

According to Gartner, Ninety percent of all organizations will be using cloud services in some form by 2022.

According to Forrester, Cloud computing makes it more efficient to convert new ideas into products and services.

Gartner comments that by 2025, 55% of large enterprises will successfully implement an all-in cloud SaaS strategy.

Cloud brings extraordinary features such as capacity elasticity, pay-as-you-go, always-on-availability, automation for performance assurance, transparent refresh management, economically practical Disaster Recovery (DR), to name a few. Key factors to consider include: 

?? Recognition of organizational, processes, policies, and workforce skills implications.

?? Costs and value realization.

?? Recognition of cloud efficiencies.

?? Security and operational visibility.

?? Data sensitivity, privacy, and co-mingling of data.

A datacenter exit strategy should not be done in a vacuum, but it needs to align with the business and technology goals and buy-in from several areas.

A jump into the cloud without adequate transformational strategy often results in higher initial cloud costs and the inability to realize some cloud's inherent added values. The following are key benefits that may be realized through cloud adoption and implementation

• Legacy IT modernization or retirement/sun-setting
• Faster time-to-market of solutions
• Environments ready when you need them (on demand)
• Enables optimal Return on Investments (ROI)
• Managed services including logging, monitoring, analytics, Identity & Access Management, can reduce operational costs.
• Reduced Operations and Maintenance costs
• Scalability, Capacity elasticity and auto-scaling
• Automation for things such as performance assurance and continuous development
• Facilitates adherence to relevant federal policy and guidelines
• High availability and fault tolerance
• More economically viable Continuity of Operations (COOP) and Disaster Recovery
• Costing models supporting "pay as you go" (based on consumption)
• Periodic capital investments in aging hardware refreshes are no longer concerns
• The most modern infrastructure and services are always available to your environment

It is essential to acknowledge that a comprehensive exit plan is needed to deal with legacy environments' complexities and prevent your data center exit program from stalling. Common obstacles exiting a legacy data center

1. Financial constraints may limit CAPEX investments in the migration program, and while migrating to the cloud, organizations will need to deal with costs maintaining the legacy data center.
2. A lock-in contractual obligation period of around 5 to 10 years is typical in most data center legacy scenarios.
3. Selecting a cloud strategy and platform requires a careful assessment of the existing application portfolio and organizational requirements in the long run.
4. Security concerns, especially around company and customer confidential information
5. Mission-critical applications interruption during workload migration, consolidation, and rationalization.
6. Long term agility and stability of the business require following architectural best practices when migrating to the cloud. 

Exiting the DC also requires the mapping, managing, and orchestration of all related tools and applications and new and legacy systems for smooth performance. Integrating existing systems, external enterprise management software, the configuration of storage and network resources, integrating data sources and service catalogs all add to the challenge of cloud transformation and management.

It is a complex environment typically comprised of multiple inter-connected server farms distributed across buildings and geographic locations. Most enterprises' data centers host numerous applications across business and customer groups within an organization.

Forrester's research indicates that 50% of digital transformation efforts stall due to a lack of preparation. Either way, to benefit from what is next, we need to prepare better.

Datacenter exit steps for consideration:

 Asset Qualification

• Run a workload discovery and assessment for in-depth insight into forecasted needs and estimate the migration roadmap and projected future cloud costs.
• Datacenter portfolio assessment off all owned or co-location (CoLo) data centers, including penalties for termination.
• Create a high-level proposal of potential cloud and projected company commitment.

 Assessment

• Physical verification of assets and datacenters.
• Establish end-to-end relationships across users, networks, applications, and hardware.
• Generate a detailed and comprehensive hardware footprint report.
• DC valuation and assessment.

 Foundation Engineering

• Design a comprehensive cloud landing zone integrating all IT components for a complete DC exit.
• Create an automated cloud architecture blueprint based on Infrastructure as Code.
• Design an E2E enterprise-grade cloud/hybrid IT operating model.

 Migrate and Divest

• Defining the move groups and executing them.
• Minimize penalties through the adoption of best practices on optimizing customer contract terms, early exit fees, and other costs.

 Run and Manage

• Automating End-to-End cloud services lifecycle management.
• Accelerating the transition to a hybrid cloud model for IT service delivery.
• Explore continuous cost control and optimization.

Businesses must address the following critical areas for their multi-cloud ambitions to be successful:

• Find the right fit: IT is more than preventing over-or under-provisioning resources. It is about getting the company's critical data, existing applications, and workloads securely transitioned to the cloud with minimal disruption.
• Put security and compliance front and center: Security and compliance are more than something you check off; they need to be viewed through the lens of business needs and risks. Security environments are continually changing, which requires businesses to develop ongoing partnerships for expertise to support scheduled audits, security breaches, or emerging threats. Be proactive and proportionate about data protection.
• Be clear on cloud visibility and management: it is possible to achieve visibility and control over a cloud environment like an on-premises infrastructure, including security, costs, and performance across the full stack available for management and reporting. 

Considerations while creating a migration strategy:

• Application Rationalization: Discover portfolio and opportunities for consolidation or retirement; map application mission functional capabilities.
• Application Disposition: Apply objective scoring mechanism to application attributes to determine the most appropriate cloud disposition ("5 R's" – Re-host, Re-platform, Refactor, Replace, Retire) option to apply.
• Workload Suitability & Placement: Apply analysis of workload interdependencies and criteria to determine appropriate CSP destination.
• Business Case:  Apply financial considerations to candidate rationalization, disposition, suitability, and placement outcomes.
• Migration Roadmap:  create and routinely iterate migration roadmap. As success is achieved, routinely refresh your roadmap based on lessons learned, the outcomes of iterating through the above steps in the delivery model and based on increased maturity and resources re-skilling and availability. Pay particular attention to DCOI exit (on-premises datacenter) strategy objectives, goal dates, complexity, interdependencies, and budget.

So, cloud strategy is essential, but organizations often make many mistakes. Gartner outlines the top 10 mistakes Gartner saw most often while reviewing hundreds of cloud strategy documents.

1. Assuming it is an IT-only strategy and not involving the business, operations, legal, finance, and procurement.
2. Not having an exit strategy.
3. Combining or confusing a cloud strategy with an implementation plan.
4. It is never too late to devise a cloud strategy.
5. Equating a cloud strategy with "We're moving everything to the cloud."
6. Saying, "Our cloud strategy is our datacenter strategy" or "It's all in or nothing."
7. Believing that an executive mandate is a strategy.
8. Having a single-vendor strategy for all things cloud.
9. Outsourcing development of your cloud strategy.
10. Saying "Our strategy is cloud-first" is the entire cloud strategy.

Cloud Application Readiness considerations:

• Application Availability: Key concerns to be addressed - SPOF (Single Point of Failure); MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery) – how long before it is up; RPO (Recovery Point Objective) – how much data can you lose; Data Integrity; Disaster recovery/ business continuity; Legal/ regulatory events; Incident response.
• Scalability: Key concerns to be addressed - Connection volume; Transaction volume; Analytics volume; Data volume; Contention/ bottlenecks; Data upload/ download; Network bandwidth; Scaling both state and behavior; Long transactions; Timeouts.
• Performance: Key concerns to be addressed - Constraints in computing, storage, network performance; Network latency; Chattiness between distributed components; Network contention/ bandwidth constraints; Single-threaded execution; Waits/timeouts; Slow failure; Poor user experience; Inflexible architecture/design; Buggy code.
• Data Persistence: Key concerns to be addressed - Big data; Inflexible data structures; Unstructured data; Concurrent access; Data integrity; CAP theorem; Real-time data; Data ownership; Lack of consistency between copies; Multiplying copies – data in the wild.
• Agility: Key concerns to be addressed - Vendor/product/cloud provider lock-in; Software licensing constraints; Application or infrastructure constraints; Tight coupling of components; Workload portability; Component portability; Reuse; Hard dependencies; Technology supportability.
• Security: Key concerns to be addressed – Intrusion; Multi-tenancy; Physical security; Identity management; Denial of service/ flooding; Data breach; Data corruption; Data integrity; Virus/Malware; Trojans/Bots; Social engineering; Incident/ compromise response; Legal/ regulatory compliance; Audit; Data ownership; Business continuity.

Conclusion

Exiting a datacenter is a crucial IT modernization strategy and provides significant cost savings opportunities. Enterprises must diligently plan their migration strategy to realize these savings.

The cloud journey begins with building a plan that aligns your datacenter exit to business goals. To obtain executive sponsorship for these modernization projects, build an understanding of which applications deliver business value and how moving those applications to the cloud may critically impact it.

Building a plan requires you to assemble a working team that represents all aspects of the business. Once the team is formed, perform the assessment, plan your migrations, and conduct modernization pilot projects to validate your strategy.

Assess which cloud operating model fits your needs; for that, you will need to understand each of the cloud operating models' benefits and limitations, including public cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud.

Datacenter exits are large, complex projects requiring both experience and expertise. Finding a partner that can provide proven expertise to help your organization make your data center migration successful is highly recommended.

The key is not to think about installing a set of technologies but instead adopt a cloud service from an outcome perspective.

It is essential that your DC Exit strategy and Cloud adoption strategy coexists with other enterprise strategic efforts rather than redo them.