How much transformation is enough transformation?

Migrating to Cloud?

So, you're migrating your existing workloads to Cloud. That's great... good for you!

Are you relocating, re-hosting, re-platforming, repurchasing, refactoring, retaining or retiring?

It is important to resit the urge to move to Cloud for the sake of moving to Cloud. It is imperative you ask yourself why you are doing it. What is the driver? What is your success criteria and what does "good" look like?

Transformation at Pace?!?

Ah, the big fat elephant in the room. How much transformation is enough transformation?

Whilst we are all seeking the promised land of architectural purity whilst (at the same time) quenching the organisation's thirst to migrate everything yesterday, we have to start by first dispelling a myth and a nirvana that you can migrate everything, quickly, whilst transforming and modernising in flight. You cannot! Everything is a trade-off - including optimisation vs. cadence. You cannot have both, and therefore need to decide why you are moving in the first place and what constitutes success!

Why move?

Why are you considering Cloud? What is wrong with your current setup? What is it that Cloud offers that is so attractive?

• Are you looking to exit an aging data centre or migrate off substandard infrastructure that is prone to outage; maybe with currency, resilience and scalability issues?
• Perhaps, you are concerned that you could not recover from a major outage, unconvinced by your unproven backup strategy, potentially proving catastrophic to the business?
• Are you looking to address vendor lock-in, commercial, contractual or licensing challenges?
• Maybe you are losing ground on the competition or unable to realise your full potential whilst not leveraging the real, and growing, power of Public Cloud?
• Are you seeking to harvest Cloud's ground-breaking AI and ML capabilities, or perhaps benefit from its global, highly resilient and scalable architecture?

Answering this question is absolutely critical when seeking an appropriate migration strategy. It is important to consider, acknowledge and articulate why you are moving your workloads, your chosen migration strategy and the parameters that define success upon which this is based on this (and can be later measured).

Garbage in, garbage out.

Cloud is not a magic wand that solves all your problems. If you give it something technically or operationally substandard and do not invest in appropriate transformation, you will be left with something equally substandard (just now sitting in someone else's data centre).

However, "substandard" is fine if you understand, acknowledge and consider this shortcoming as part of your wider rationale for migrating.

As mentioned above, if success is exiting a flakey data centre and an infrastructure that is likely to curl over at any time, then throwing your legacy application over the fence to the relative stability of Cloud is perhaps the right decision.

Just be clear about the why!

Harness the power!

Leveraging the true potential of Cloud requires an application, infrastructure and supporting ecosystem that is architected accordingly, embracing modern principles, techniques and frameworks.

Your immutable and ephemeral, micro-service based, containerised services, with API-based interactions, serverless and Cloud-native foundation, all delivered through fully automated CI/CD pipelines (wow, what a mouthful) is how you harness its true power.

Your embrace of Cloud's native data handling services, providing advanced and automated orchestration pipelines; ingestion, transformation and storage in highly scalable and resilient data warehouses and data lakes; modelling using Cloud's unparalleled built-in AI and ML capabilities, providing a data platform that underpins your organisation's data-driven aspirations. That is how you really harness the power of Cloud.

However, do you have the time, budget, skills and inclination? The rewards are great (REALLY great), but unless you're green-field, the transformational effort may not always warrant the investment in all scenarios.

Mix and Match.

The reality is, for most medium to large organisations, you will need a mix of migration strategies to accommodate various workloads of differing characteristics and success criteria.

Some you can throw over the fence, untouched, others are worth the time and investment, maximising your target offering (whilst the majority will sit somewhere between the two).

One size does not fit all!

It takes two!

It is not sexy and you run the risk of only doing half-a-job, but in the event of needing to migrate a workload at pace (without the luxury of time), then a multi-phased approach may be the answer.

So, whilst migrating a legacy monolithic application to a Cloud-based VM, with minimum transformation, may not feel like the right thing to do (especially for the Cloud purists out there); sometimes it is the only viable option. However, doing this in the first instance may give you the time and space to then consider your options, affording you the opportunity to rearchitect and re-engineer thereafter!

The difficulty is, how do you ensure you retain the impetus, support and funding to still do step 2 ("transform") once step 1 is done and dusted?!?

Consider your options. Be clear. Be realistic.