CUTTING THROUGH THE NOISE OF A DATA CENTRE EXIT STRATEGY

The days of the traditional enterprise data centre may be numbered.

Even before the Covid pandemic, organisations were moving away from on-premise infrastructure and towards data centres hosted in the cloud. The past 2 years, however, have seen an uptick in cloud migration, as businesses have sought greater flexibility in their modes of working.

According to Gartner, 90% 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.

As far as many organisations are concerned, the benefits speak for themselves. Compared to on-premise data centres, cloud computing technologies offer greater efficiency, scalability, simplicity and global reach. Over the longer term, there can be significant cost savings too, given the lack of maintenance costs and the ability to scale up or down according to what you actually need.

So, you may already find yourself in one of the following situations:

* You may be coming to the end of your current contract with your current data centre provider, but you are hesitant (for a number of reasons) to renew for another 5 years?

* You may have been through the “honeymoon period” with your current data centre provider and now service levels and innovations are a thing of the past now?

* Or your CIO or Board have announced their Digital Change & Transformation, which incorporates a ‘Cloud First’ & ‘Data First’ strategy – so it’s time to investigate moving everything, or something, to the cloud, IaaS, PaaS or SaaS models.

But exiting the corporate data centre can be an intimidating and complex proposition. Common obstacles include:

? Risking data loss and interruption of mission-critical applications during workload rationalization, consolidation and migration.

? Ensuring architecture and security best practices when deploying on new platforms.

? Accurately assessing the existing application portfolio and making optimal decisions about platform selection and cloud strategy (e.g., lift and shift vs. refactoring).

So where do you start??

Well, not with your current data centre provider.?

The minute they find out, things could get very complicated, very quickly.?And we certainly wouldn’t recommend letting the open market find out, as you will very quickly be surrounded by a great deal of noise from slick Sales people offering you the latest and greatest “solutions” – which, as we all know, will be their own branded solutions, tin, servers, wires and ways of working which again, tie you onto 1 horse.

Start at the beginning.?With an independent view.

Sounds obvious, right??But before you can even start thinking about making decisions, do you know what is actually in your data centre??Don’t be embarrassed to admit that you don’t.?With organisations having been tied into previously long agreements with their current on prem data centre providers (sometimes over 10 – 15 years in some cases), it's quite common for a bit of complacency to have creep in over the years.

“Oh our provider will know exactly what’s in there”……

“We have had a couple of guys manage the data centre provider over the years who have left the business, but I’m sure they would have kept an inventory up to date on our side”…….

“I have been told that the right people still own the Apps that sit on the servers and they know what is being used and what isn’t”……

“The data centre contract is around the office somewhere – I’m sure things haven’t changed that much over the years”…….

Sound familiar??If so, you may find yourself in an awkward situation like a number of our clients have found themselves in.?You have been tasked by the Board with making key decisions on where, how and when to move your data centre, but after an initial foray around the organisation, you realise you don’t have some, or any of the key (current) foundation information.

James Harvard has helped a number of organisations with this very issue. Why? Independence is key.

Put simply, you HAVE to get this information quickly and you have 3 options:

1)?????Approach your current provider and ask for a full, warts and all exercise to provide that information to you.?As previously mentioned, people aren’t stupid and that will only send the hares running and life could quickly become awkward.

2)?????You could try and do it internally with your own employees.?However, just like every other organisation at present, the chances are all resource are stretched to the max already – and there is an inconvenient truth that internal teams just don’t have the skills required.

3)?????Bring in an external, specialist team, who are experienced in this very thing.?Totally independent, technology agnostic, who fully understand the sensitivities on both sides and who can gel into your current teams and stakeholders in order to quickly deliver.

Each organisation will be different of course in regard to what they need in order to base their key decisions on.?James Harvard has deployed a number of teams to crowd around client initiatives and below are a number of deliverables that we have provided different clients with as part of these discovery projects:

?????????????A completed ‘Single Source of Truth’ inventory of all Servers, Applications and Services including all dependencies. ?What do I actually have in there?

?????????????An Enterprise-wide Decision Tree for making application migration decisions / recommendations. ?What can be moved??What do we actually WANT to move?

?????????????A completed set of application groups for applications that needed to be migrated together. How do we move them??Who owns them??Are they still being used??What happens if we turn them off?

?????????????A high-level roadmap / timeline for migration of all the applications.?The ‘do-ing’.

?????????????An updated Cloud Strategy including recommendations on Cloud hosting.?A co-created blue print of what a future state could look like, based on the above.?Totally independent, but providing all the options based on fact and SME experience, not “sell”. ?

The benefits of moving to the cloud are well documented and the rewards when fully up and running can be massive.?Technology is moving faster than ever before.?However, with that the noise increases around critical decision making which you can not afford to get wrong, or organisations run the risk of being left behind.

Cut through the noise.

If anyone would like to discuss the above, talk through recent case studies or start to whiteboard some ideas for your own data centre exit discovery plan, then contact me at [email protected] for an initial chat.?