Things to Consider Before, During & After Your Cloud Migration

by JANA Life Sciences

For your convenience, we have created a melded version of the three-part series related to cloud migration considerations that we recently published. We encourage you to share this with your colleagues and network if you think it could be of value to them. Thank you.

The buzzword “Cloud” is shorthand for “Cloud Computing”, which implies a non-physical/ virtual platform for processing information. As the Cloud’s capabilities and scale have gown, processing large quantities of data has become much more practical, cost efficient and commonplace. As a result, IT infrastructure costs within companies (and specifically those for on premise solutions) are increasingly being scrutinized, particularly with the broadening of the Cloud’s offerings related to: storage, computation, data distribution, access freedom (i.e., where and when), access control (i.e., who and what), reliability and fault tolerance.

BEFORE YOUR CLOUD MIGRATION

1.    Why might you want to migrate to the Cloud?

With so many benefits associated with the Cloud, it’s not hard to understand why so many companies and organizations feel pressured to develop and adopt a Cloud strategy. And yet, before going ‘there’ – they would be better served to determine whether their needs can be met by simply enhancing their existing technology. If this is not deemed practical or favorable, then a company should feel comfortable with the idea of proceeding in embracing the Cloud sooner than later.

Presuming one is now heading down the path to the Cloud, the first thing one needs to ask is, “What exactly is the purpose for my Cloud solution?” Is it to solve a missing capability? Is it to mitigate an existing issue? Or, might it be a means toward enhancing a current (or near-term future) offering? Perhaps it’s a mix of these. Whatever the case may be, you would be well served to next make a list of the goals you would like to reach with a Cloud solution. In developing this list, you will then want to prioritize your goals and determine the optimal timing for each. Having a prioritized list is important, especially if you were to take an agile (piecewise) approach in building your solution.

2.    Are your customers ready for the Cloud?

While you may have made the decision that migrating to the Cloud is the right solution for your organization, you need to understand whether your customers are ready for such a solution – and this will require you to perform a thorough customer impact assessment. Two of the most important elements associated with this assessment relate to access capability and regulations, policies and procedures.

With regard to access capability, a Cloud solution demands a live internet connection from all access points – all the time. You need to know whether these live access points are available to your customers and end users. If not, you need to know whether they can be established, and if so, the relative timing.

With regard to regulations, policies and procedures, you will want to know where there are any policies or procedures that may make it difficult or perhaps impossible for your customers to adopt a Cloud solution in the short or near term.

3.    Is your infrastructure ready for the Cloud?

Is your IT infrastructure ready for the Cloud? IT infrastructure is made up of many interacting components, and each aspects related to service access, application logic/data processing, and data storage. Can the user access pattern be supported? Can the security be maintained without impacting accessibility? Can the application/processing logic be easily ported and deployed in the Cloud? Can the data storage to be duplicated in the Cloud? If not, might a hybrid Cloud solution (Cloud + on prem) be an option? These are just some of the questions you need to consider.

4.    Is your migration timing right for the Cloud?

If your system is only partially ready for Cloud, then a phased approach might be more practical for your migration effort. If that’s the case, then your migration needs to be carefully planned to support the transition period during which your overall system is part on premise and part in the Cloud. This will likely impact the architecture of the system and requires a ‘bridging strategy’. One possibility is to migrate new systems/applications to the Cloud first. In doing so, it will give the organization an opportunity to gain experience and knowledge that will prove beneficial in subsequent migration efforts. Another approach to consider is the idea of migrating based on your organizational structure, which has the distinct benefit of making it easier to staff resources. The complication of the phased approach, however, is that during the transition period the interaction between the old system and the migrated system (Cloud-based) may not be fully function. Planning will be needed here in order to mitigate this risk and address the gap.

5.    How are you going to choose the Cloud solution?

There are many Cloud vendors, and they are not all equal. They come with different features, costs models, strengths, and weaknesses. Your time will be well spent to ensure you understand the relative costs and benefits of each vendor and the associated elements based on your prioritized goals, as this will enable you to better quantify and assess the relative merits and value of each.

Here are a few key elements to consider:

• Processing: Batch, Stream, Container-based Solutions
• Storage: Formats, Duration (short/medium/long term storage), Auditing Capability
• Scalability: In terms of users, access points, requests, data volume, etc.
• Flexibility: How flexible can the plan/contract be modified? Time commitments?
• Elasticity: How flexible can the configurations be? How fast can the capacity be dynamically scaled up, and down, automatically, depending on the demands/loads?
• Fault Tolerance: How tolerant is the Cloud solution? Up time guarantee?
• Cost Model: Vendors have different charging models. Some are sensitive to the number of users while others are more sensitive to processing time (CPU time).
• Special Needs: Location guarantee (EU and China, for example, have laws that forbid storing citizen data outside their jurisdiction); reproducibility (FDA Dx systems need to show evidence that Dx outcomes are the same and are processed the same way)

6.    How are you going to perform the migration?

System migration, particularly infrastructure system migration, is a highly complicated operation that requires significant collaboration and coordination. Identifying your stakeholders is paramount with a system migration. Stakeholders are the organizations and people who will be involved in the migration or impacted by the migration in some shape or form. It is important to identify upfront who is sponsoring the effort, who is performing the migration operation (i.e., who owns what), and who may be impacted by the operation. Each and every stakeholder’s concerns and requirements need to be carefully evaluated and prioritized. At the same time, decisions and appreciation for impact needs to be discussed and communicated to ensure ‘everyone is on the same page’.

7.    How are you going to assess the Cloud migration effort?

It is crucial for the migration team to have a general agreement on the assessment process in advance of starting the operation. While aspects related to this will be discussed in our next two related postings, here are a few things to consider:

1. Start planning your assessment from day one of the entire effort
2. Assessment criteria should reflect the goals of the migration effort
3. Assess the success from multiple angles: User Feedback; Cost Effectivenes; and, Feature Delivery

DURING YOUR CLOUD MIGRATION

1.    How do you get started?

If you’re just getting started with your initial cloud migration effort, things may seem simple at first. Yet, they have a way of sometimes (and quickly) becoming complicated. In order to maintain the appropriate level of control with this effort, it might help to:

·      Start small. Beginning with a project that has a narrow scope, fewer unknowns and a minimal number of new or complicated features will serve you and your organization well. Even better would be to commence with a project that has limited impact on the business so as to minimize and/ or contain disruption risk.

·      Approach the effort in a phased manner. Divide the project into phases where each has its own clearly defined goals, functions and acceptance criteria. Review the outcome, measure the success/failure, gain experience and apply the knowledge in the subsequent phases.

·      Be flexible in your scope. As you gain more knowledge and experience in what a cloud-based system can offer, review your plan and update it accordingly. Consider refraining from migrating certain features or systems in the event you see reason for concern.

·      Be flexible in the schedule. This is particularly true when you’re just getting started. Cloud applications tend to be distributed in nature, and distributed systems are not easy to manage from either a design or implementation perspective. Be sure to leave ample time for testing the system’s functionality, usability, etc. At the same time, keep a close tab on the progress of the project and plan to adjust the schedule accordingly.

2.    Are you thinking broadly enough?

Cloud infrastructure gives us tremendous opportunities to handle situations that may have been inconceivable just a few years ago. AI and ML, flexible accessibility to millions of users and devices (IoT), Big Data and unlimited storage are just a few things inherently associated with cloud offerings. Some aspects that you may wish to consider when it comes to these include:

·      AI and ML – Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are becoming increasing realities. The trick is knowing how to embrace the technologies, understand the domain, and effectively utilize them to your advantage. While you will want to be open-minded and assess whether there may be an opportunity to use them, you will also want to be sure to have your priorities clearly identified while holding the reins reasonably tight on your project scope.

·      IoT – The Internet of Things (IoT) focuses on connectivity, management and the operation of intelligent devices. Data generated from these connected devices enables the mining of scientific knowledge and business insight, and fully taking advantage of such an opportunity can put your organization a step ahead of your competition.

·      Big Data – Unlimited data storage and IoT enable and promote the collection of vast quantities of data. Big Data enables us to analyze once unwieldly sets in a much more timely and cost effective manner. Look hard in your organization and in the data you’re collecting and chances are you’ll find ways in which to extract valuable insights and knowledge for your business.

·     Semantic Web – Web or not, this is about building semantic relationships between entities you have and using the relationships to enable easy navigation and retrieval of information. Embracing this will enable you to gain more insight to your business while also enabling you to offer potential solutions that are not readily available when viewed in isolation.

3.    Do you have a backup plan?

Things are likely to go wrong during a cloud migration. Thus, you will benefit in having a backup plan. Related to this, you might be well served to:

·      Have a backup plan for ‘backing out’ of the latest deployment, if need be. In doing so, you will need to be able to restore a previous version of a system with confidence. Establish a targeted time limit for the downtime and plan to have routine fire drills for the operation.

·      Have an automated monitoring system so that undesirable situations can be readily detected, with the response team being automatically notified.

·      Have a procedure in place for responses while making sure the chain of command is clearly established, communicated and understood.

4.    Have you automated everything (within reason)?

While you may wish to automate as much as possible, you will need to be pragmatic and consider the 80/20 rule in establishing which elements to automate upfront. This includes project setup, system testing (unit, integration, functional), system building, staging, deployment and operation. The DevOps approach, which is predicated on removing the barrier between the Development and Operational teams and activities, will likely help you to produce a higher quality.

Most of the common/quality automation tools allow you to configure and customize the automation behavior. They usually allow you to create different profiles to be run with different frequencies, durations and timings. Each profile allows you to select the coverage, the resources, etc., with the benefits resulting in:

·      A higher quality system

·      Fewer operational errors/mistakes

·      Faster correction of errors/issues

·      Shorter deployment durations

·      Repeatability and reproducibility

5.    Is your system secure?

When migrating to the cloud, security becomes more important due to the nature of exposed services. In addition, because a cloud-based solution cannot inherit the security protection from an on-prem solution, an altogether new security measure must be architected and installed. The protection needs to be extended to your system, your data and both your customers and users. Carefully study the use case/usage pattern of your users and customers while asking the following questions:

·      Do they need single sign on?

·      What’s your existing technology for authenticating users and authorizing their access?

·      Is the technology compatible with your offering? If not, what are your alternatives?

6.    Is your system reliable and performant?

Cloud-based systems increasingly have dependencies on other services and components, many of which are dynamic in nature. Make sure you understand the behavior (stateful /stateless, etc.) of these services and components and have a plan in place if and when they change. At the same time, be sure requests are processed under the appropriate context.

·      Can your system support the expected/desired load? A cloud-based system is expected to handle thousands of current users and potentially millions of devices.

·      Does your vendor support such demand? Is your system architected for such use cases?

·      Will the system meet throughput as well as latency requirements? Are there means in place to measure these?

·      Does your system scale when needed? Ideally, the system should be designed to automatically scale up and down with demand, enabling you to use your resources most efficiently.

7.    Is your data ready for use?

Data enables a business to extract knowledge, build intelligence, make future predications and, most importantly, guide decisions. As such, ensuring the quality of your data is critical. The following three aspects are paramount in building a quality data set:

·      Persistence of data. Get the data persisted (saved) as quickly as possible once it’s available. Lost data is gone forever. Once persisted, it is common to transform the data into different structures and formats for different purposes/uses, with different life expectancies.

·      Security of the data. Data needs to be secured. Data can be tampered with during transition, and inaccurate/bad data can be ingested into the system. This is particularly true for a cloud-based system given its open nature. A reliable data custody mechanism needs to be in place as part of a cloud solution.

·      Consistency of the data. With data coming from different sources (and sometimes out of order), reviewing the data and ensuring its consistency becomes vitally important. While a manual review is often the first step, the end goal should be to aim for an automated approach as soon as possible.

AFTER YOUR CLOUD MIGRATION

1.    Have you cleaned up your old services?

Now that you’ve got your new, cloud-based system up and running, you need to make sure the old system is taken out of operation. Here, you will want to make sure you perform all the necessary backups, including associated access mechanisms, and at the same time shut down unnecessary services. Again, make sure that the service is up and running and that it is only being provided by the new, cloud-based system.

2.    Have you updated your procedures for the Operations Team?

While you may have likely updated your procedures for the Operations Team in advance of deploying your new cloud service, it is likely you won’t be able to finalize them until you’ve gained sufficient experience and knowledge from actual operations. As a result, you should plan to monitor the operations and update the associated documents accordingly, perhaps in batches or waves.

3.    Have you trained your customers and users for your new cloud services?

Cloud services are by their nature different from desktop applications; they require live internet connections and their user interfaces are usually constrained to a browser. As a result, your users and customers need to be trained on the new system, which will require you to:

·      Develop training materials, including self-study guides;

·      Conduct training sessions;

·      Establish support lines and communicate their availability; and lastly,

·      Collect feedback and improve the training material and the system itself.

4.    Have you established your monitoring and evaluation system?

You should not expect your new system to operate optimally at the outset for a variety of reasons (e.g., misunderstandings, errors, etc.). As such, you should aim to establish a systematic approach to monitor the system continuously, identify issues and their root causes when discovered and remedy them in a thoughtful manner. Collecting as much performance/usage pattern data as possible will serve you well toward fine-tuning the system.

As part of the evaluation of the new system, you should plan to conduct surveys to evaluate the functionality, performance and usability. Surveys should include all your stakeholders, including users/ customers as well as your Operation and Support Team members. Plan to share the survey data with your stakeholders, and aim to be as transparent as possible. Your team members will benefit from the negative feedback just as much, if not more than the positive.

5.    Have you performed retrospectives on your migration effort?

If you haven’t done so already, performing retrospectives (i.e., a Lessons Learned exercise) with your development and operation teams will be time well spent. Carefully analyze the feedback and suggestions of team members with the aim to crystallize and categorize the information. Be sure that it is clear even to those not participating in the effort. Related to this, reviewing Lessons Learned from one project at the kickoff meeting for the next project will serve you well, too.

During retrospectives it’s important to ensure all stakeholders’ voices are sought and heard, including those of the sponsor(s). It’s invariable that you will find communication to be a recurring and perhaps central them, and this may relate to channels, mechanisms, styles, etc. Some other common issues and complaints seen with teams include their insufficient access to needed resources, unclear or changing requirements, and a lack of clarity or speed in decision making.

6.    Have you planned for improving/enhancing your operations, including security?

As you go through your cloud journey and collect greater insight to your customer’s needs and come to appreciate the cloud’s ever-increasing capabilities, you’ll want to take full advantage of the platform to better serve your customers. At the same time, you will want to monitor and review the performance of your system while paying close attention to security. Any pre-existing security flaws will significantly increase the risk and/or impact associated with the new system given the cloud’s open nature. To increase the confidence in your security measures, consider conducting a review, including an ethical hacking by a reputable third party.

In addition, you can consider features that may have been dropped from the prior release(s) due to resource and/ or schedule constraints. Carefully review customer/user feedback to determine the impact of the missing features, and schedule their releases accordingly.

Lastly, carefully review the system’s performance and its dependency on other components/services, and in the event a service or component you are dependent on is hindering the operation, begin looking for alternatives. 

7.    Have you started promoting your new cloud services?

Given your service offering is now available via the web, you will want to promote its inherent benefits to your customers and partners alike. This comprises factors associated with an array of benefits, including accessibility (regardless of time or place) and capacity, just to name a few. Your cloud-based services can now be promoted simply through a hyperlink.

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 JANA, Inc. is a third-generation, family-owned company founded by Joseph A. Niland in 1973. Our 200+ employees group wide provide services associated with: 1) Technical Authoring & Medical Writing; 2) Project, Process & Procedural Management; 3) Data, Document & Systems Management; and, 4) Health Sciences, including Engineering. If you have any questions or interest in related discussion, please feel free to write or call me anytime.

Sincerely,

Ronald B. Niland, President, JANA Life Sciences

Cell: (805) 405-4115; eMail: rniland@janacorp.com