Your fastest way to move off an on-premise data infrastructure to the cloud.

It took many years, but the majority of companies have fundamentally realized (and have already started) that moving to the cloud is the right decision. With this move comes modernization, flexibility and access to exciting new services and a steady influx of new technology.

Moving to the cloud is hard for many reasons.

The first hurdle, is if there is even a place to move your on-premise data and applications to in the first place i.e. will this software even run in the cloud, let alone have the possibility to leverage value from being in the cloud. The chance of this is made easier by the fact that you can run virtual machines in the cloud, but the chance of it leveraging the true value from the cloud is highly unlikely, if not close to impossible to be true. Why? Because applications need to have be designed from the ground up to work in the cloud. It needs to be decoupled, it needs to be abstracted enough to switch services in and out.

For these reasons it is obvious that certain applications will need to be redesigned on the cloud to be able to benefit from the cloud. There are however many applications that are easier to lift and shift. Let's be clear. Shifting, will typically not make your applications work with the cloud, but work in the cloud. These are very different things and the later is much less valuable to do than the other.

So, why should you move to the cloud? I know there are literally 1000's of articles on this and chances are that I am "beating a dead horse" but I think I have something to add to the fire. The cloud brings a new way of operating. It brings new efficiencies, IF the technology you use is built to support it. The "If" must be re-iterated because I see a lot of companies getting a bad experience if platforms just "work in the cloud" and not "work with the cloud".

Taking full advantage of the cloud is very much down to the Vendors and their ability to build applications with immense abstraction in their design. For example, the ability to take parts of an application and switch them out to use Cloud products is the key to taking advantage of the cloud. The advantages of the cloud come in many forms including new features, potential lower operating costs - but for our customers what is most important is that they are using services where keeping the SLA's on that service is "no longer their problem." This truly is the ability for companies to utilise data to provide value, but not have to be a technology company themselves or take on the burden or upgrades, maintenance and more.

What does CluedIn have to do with migrating to the cloud and how are we helping with this?

Firstly, we see the migration as a means to an end. This "end", is reaching the future of data management. You can see our thoughts on what that looks like here. Hence, it is in our interest to provide a path with ease and success. When you think about it, migrating many systems into a new infrastructure and bringing many different data sources together has some overlap to it. The part we play is that CluedIn provides the infrastructure to bring in data from many sources (including on-premise legacy systems) and then provide a layer of that data that is separated in persistence and compute i.e. exactly what the cloud wants.

This movement to a separation of storage and processing gives you a flexible, scalable infrastructure to move this data to any number of systems. This is how CluedIn can help with migration projects.

CluedIn is, and always has, and always will be a piece of "middleware", it is not the end place of the journey of your data. This is the exact same position as migration, in that it is a means to an end, it is middleware.

With migration being the context of the following analogy, your data (pre-cloud) has a maturity of 1 out of 10. Although the data in the system may be very mature, in the context of migration, it is not. The goal of CluedIn in the migration use case is to take this data at a maturity of 1 and prepare it to a maturity of 4. This naturally means that CluedIn can play a role in the process, but isn't 'THE' process. There is such a monumental task in moving to the cloud, and the real benefit of CluedIn is to act as one of many of the possible accelerators - something that can literally save months or years of work.

In building CluedIn, one thing has become very, very clear. People want to pay for services that bring value. The cloud is the infrastructure that supports that model more than the on-premise approach. Hence we are excited about more and more companies moving to this new model.