How beneficial is cloud migration for your organisation?

Cloud migration – the process of moving data and applications from local storage devices to a remote database, or moving them from one cloud to another – is becoming more prominent today. According to the “Anatomy of a cloud migration” report released by Rackspace, companies are migrating to the cloud due to the increased availability of technological advances – rather than being driven by business needs.

Why the move to cloud migration?

The report stipulates that Australia is today regarded as a cloud mature country with many companies considering cloud migration owing to the benefits it would bring – reduce IT costs and mitigate business risks. For the purpose of this article, we will refer to companies who plan to move workloads to cloud migration as ‘planners’ and companies who have already moved workloads to cloud migration as ‘migrators’.

Key findings from the report are set out below:

• Both planners and migrators have identified resilience or disaster recovery as their main motivator to move to cloud migration - at 87% and 85% respectively
• 63% of planners have named reducing IT costs as their main motivator to switch to cloud
• Access to scalable resources when having to respond to a surge in demand was also an important motivator for planners
• 80% of migrators have opted for cloud migration to increase their agility – in comparison to only 48% of planners

The above shows that both planners and migrators see the value in cloud migration – although their rationale may differ. One common trend that stood out is how customer demand and business requirements were not key motivators for either planners or migrators.

What are the main concerns for cloud migration?

The "Telsyte Australian Infrastructure & Cloud Computing Market Study 2015" estimated the total market value for public cloud infrastructure services to double up to $775 million by 2019 – a $409 million increase from 2015.

However such an upsurge in cloud migration activity would not go unnoticed without addressing the challenges or concerns prior to the shift of workloads from an organisation’s ageing infrastructure to a new environment.

Amongst the cloud migration concerns in Australia, the following three matters were the most common across migrators and planners respectively:

• Application performance and availability (70% and 78%)
• Business risk such as loss of revenue (65% and 80%)    
• Security and privacy requirements (69% and 65%)

The degree of an organisation’s readiness for cloud migration is crucial when determining the success of its implementation. According to a strategy guide released by Rackspace in conjunction with IDG, 40% of Australian businesses do not have adequate internal expertise to implement cloud and 45% have concerns about technical employees’ administration time in managing cloud services. An example is how Chief Information Officers have increasingly spent more time managing their in-house cloud environments following the cloud migration process – rather than focusing on consulting within their own businesses and stakeholders.

How to better prepare for the successful implementation of cloud migration?

For cloud migration to be successfully implemented, Rackspace’s strategy guide states that a company’s internal team would have to work closely with various delivery partners. In order to benefit from the cloud’s elasticity and the efficiencies that become available in complex cloud infrastructure like Amazon Web Services (AWS), companies need to look at the cloud migration of its data and applications as an ongoing process, instead of a one-time application.

The report also states that while going through the cloud migration process, companies should work with both a cloud partner and existing application vendors simultaneously. This is because it is important to have one principle partner that would coordinate the end-to-end process – including which specialist contractors to take part in the project.

Recent news in cloud migration

• Google has acquired enterprise cloud migration company – Velostrata to facilitate quick and easy migration of virtual machine-based workloads such as DevOps and the ability to enable customers to control the location of their data, i.e.: either on-premises or in the cloud.
• Australian technology services provider TAS, has partnered with Alibaba Cloud to provide a secure cloud service to the financial services industry across the Asia Pacific region. 
• Cloud accounting firm Xero credits AWS for having improved its gross margin by 81% by reducing its hosting costs after migrating the data of more than 700,000 customers to AWS.
• Red Hat and IBM have combined their technologies to offer hybrid cloud with IBM Cloud Private and Red Hat OpenShift serving as the common foundation. This agreement has been designed to allow developers to design and launch new applications at a faster rate.

Progressive Recruitment specialises in placing cloud engineers with global software firms as well as tech start-ups. If you would like to further discuss the above or get access to specialised talent within cloud, please do not hesitate to contact us. You may also follow us on our LinkedIn page to get a glimpse of how we can assist you.