Common Goals for Migrating to the Cloud
When migrating any workload to a new environment, whether it be another datacenter, or to a public cloud, a clear set of goals for migration should be in mind. Note that there are both technology-focused and business-focused goals that motivate potential migrations, but any such effort should result in direct benefits to the organization’s business. Some example goals that cause workload owners to consider migrations include:
Addressing the hardware obsolescence cycle – Networking, storage, and compute hardware begins aging the day it is unboxed in a datacenter. After 3-5 years of operational use, organizations are left with hardware that is increasingly expensive to maintain and that experiences a greater number of hardware failures. New hardware is justified and ordered, then the challenge of migrating workloads to it begins. The cycle repeats itself in 3-5 years. Many organizations want an alternative to this expensive cycle.
Moving away from the ‘pre-purchase capacity’ model – When purchasing hardware, organizations must pre-purchase sufficient capacity to grow into over a 3 to 5-year period. Organizations desire the ability to pay only for the capacity required at that moment, and to be able to scale workloads up, down, in, and out as demand dictates.
Lack of IT agility – A perceived slowness in IT responding to business needs, can translate into missed opportunities. Organizations want to have IT respond quickly with robust, modern solutions when a business opportunity presents itself.
Desire to re-focus on core competencies – Organizations whose core purpose is not related to managing complex datacenter deployments, may eventually want to shed competing interests and focus on improving their core business.
Expense of maintaining a global presence – Organizations that have customers all over the world want to serve that distributed user base well. But maintaining datacenter deployments in many, geographically dispersed locations, is complex and expensive.
Enable disaster-recovery scenarios – Business continuity and disaster recovery are critical concerns that keep business leaders up at night. But enabling these scenarios has typically been prohibitively expensive and extremely complex.