A cloud utopia – it’s not as easy as lift and shift
Repeatedly, organisations are being faced with the reality that simply migrating to the cloud isn’t the answer to their digital transformation dreams. In fact, it’s only the first step to unlocking the full power of cloud.
Key Takeaways
- COVID-19 accelerated cloud migration for many organisations, driven by the need to support remote work and increasing customer demands on IT infrastructure.
- Post-migration phases require equal attention to ensure applications perform well in the cloud, as many organisations overlook necessary re-architecting efforts.
- Cloud cost optimisation remains a priority, with many organisations wasting a significant portion of their cloud spend.
Feeling the pinch
COVID-19 accelerated many organisations’ migration projects and fuelled the start of many more.
It’s understandable. They needed to keep pace with the demands of a remote workforce, especially with the security issues that came hand-in-hand with decentralising people. And of course, customer demand skyrocketed, putting more and more strain on IT. To give one example, a restaurant chain surveyed by McKinsey reported that when the pandemic kicked off, their daily online orders jumped to 400,000 per day, from 50,000. This increase in volume is overwhelming on any business and its unsuspecting infrastructure.
So, organisations moved to the cloud to solve their problems. Soon after it became abundantly clear that it’s not as easy as ‘lift and shift’ with purse strings first to feel the pinch.
Cloud migration is not an outcome
Cloud transformations usually begin with a migration. A process that takes months or even years. So, it’s no surprise that there’s a sense of achievement and completion at the finish line. However, this is where most companies get caught out.
Software experts, Lynkz, support organisations every day with their application transition to the cloud. Over and over, Ben Creamer, General Manager at Lynkz, sees cloud migrations wrapping up and businesses left wondering why their applications are underperforming in this new environment. Ben urges organisations not to forget about the post-migration phase of their cloud transformation.
“Post Migration needs equal investment and attention as your migration project itself. When you factor in the post-migration phase into your initial planning, you’ll have greater understanding of your systems and the cloud possibilities for your business. Many of your applications will need re-architecting or improving, it’s inevitable. Only once re-architected will you be able to take full advantage of scalability, larger processing capability and “on demand” services available in the cloud. Without these initiatives, savings or return on investment may not be as significant as predicted and can result in projects underdelivering”, said Ben.
The true cost of cloud
Most organisations waste 30% of cloud spend, an expenditure that continues to rise year-on-year. This is not surprising, as organisations continuously experience cost overruns during the migration phase due to onboarding the wrong project team and choosing a provider with inflexible contracts that lock in process and price.
According to Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud report, respondents said that their public cloud spend was over budget by an average of 13 percent, and expect it to increase by 29 percent in the next twelve months.
“Some organisations think that simply “moving everything to the cloud” will save money, which is an exaggerated outcome in most cases due to poor planning. No one wants to be the CIO or IT Manager facing the board, explaining where they went wrong and asking for more money to fix their mistakes. However, more often than not the true cost of cloud is a hot topic in the boardroom.”
- Ben Creamer, General Manager at Lynkz
Cloud optimisation health check
The main focus for many companies in 2022 continues to be cloud cost optimisation, spilling over from 2021 where 61% of surveyed organisations planned to optimise their cloud costs. If you’re one of many going back to the drawing board six to 12 months in, start by understanding your cloud waste with a simple health check. You’ll end up with a clear picture of your current cloud wastage that will help you plan to optimise your costs.
From Interactive’s experience, one way to offload risk and complexity is by identifying workloads that can shift straight to SaaS. This can work a treat but not all workloads or services are a good fit. For those residual applications, their roles and functions need to be broken down to leverage more from the native platform capabilities. Networking, web servers, databases and security controls are great places to explore PaaS offerings. Moving to cloud-native offerings where possible often lowers cost, increases performance, and improves inter-operability.
Cloud adoption has the potential to be transformative once it’s done right. Get the best team on board as soon as possible and organisations will reap the benefits a lot sooner than expected.
