Cloud migration - Easy to talk about but not always easy to deliver the value

You wouldn't go off in to the wilderness without a map would you? You wouldn't dare risk encountering the dangers of a journey to some far off mountain range, with so many hidden risks lying around every corner and yet, not be fully prepared before you set off to tackle them.

The buzz around cloud migration is everywhere, however companies are in fact not always properly prepared and are heading off on their journey without the granular detail that will ensure that they have their eyes wide open for the route ahead and the best chances of realising success.

When embarking on any journey you need to know exactly where you are today, before you can plan a predictable route to your destination.

You need a map!

The journey to Public Cloud is often seen just through the lens of IT costs, with a simple Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) justification model comparing hardware and platform support. The truth is often more complicated; and it is often difficult to demonstrate how, or even if, value has been delivered to the business by what is usually an expensive, multi-year project. So do the work upfront that will return the greatest value sooner and yes it might be painful, but if it gives you the best value return you'll be grateful in the years that follow!

The map -

• A granular view of both TCO and business impacts allows the prioritisation of the individual application migrations that will deliver the greatest real return. You need to know how everything is connected to allow the migration to take place, everything needs to be tagged and some things will move easily, some won't - we are engaged with a customer who went off on a journey without their map and after losing control of the migration, are moving some things back out of the cloud because they aren't working and delivering no value.
• The terms of software licencing and contract renewals can have significant effect on the return and timing of migrations. 
• Where target Applications or Business Processes that use them are involved in current Change Portfolios, intelligent decisions can be made to prioritise the sequence of events. 
• Understanding the regulatory requirements associated with an application or the Business Processes that use them, helps avoid costly remediation or non-compliance post-migration, as well as through the migration process itself. This is an example where we are involved in a GDPR programme as part of a cloud migration, you need to think about the data today, the data in flight to the cloud and then the data that finally sits in the cloud.

An agile map containing the many interdependencies between Applications, Business Processes, Contract Commitments, Regulations, Policies and Change Portfolios enables an organisation to plan and prioritise with certainty, provide on-going governance and assurance, and demonstrate business impacts as they are realised. 

At PRIMED we are working with customers who are engaging in large scale cloud migration to help them deliver the certainty they are seeking, by providing the understanding of the fine detail and the governance to allow them to control the migration.

We'd be delighted to tell you more about how we are bringing certainty to the lives of our customers with 'Detail Through Dashboards' through the PRIMED platform.