Tag: Business Improvement

Welcome to the final instalment of the Cloud Migration Guide. If you’ve missed an earlier part or would like a recap, click here to view: Part 1: What is a cloud migration | Part 2: The risks and rewards of migration | Part 3: Factors which influence cloud readiness.

Cloud migration has a lot to offer businesses.

• Enables increased efficiency, collaboration and productivity with cloud-based software like Office 365.
• Establishes a disaster recovery system that restores data and IT systems in minutes.
• Lets you create online backups and live replicas of your IT environment to minimise data loss and increase reliability.
• Boosts business flexibility and performance with hosted infrastructure and hosted desktops.

But many businesses don’t find success when undertaking their migration. Here are the most common pitfalls and traps that stop businesses from experiencing cloud migration success and how you can avoid them.

1. Trying to do it alone

Cloud migration is much more complicated than it seems. Going it alone means the project can easily become mismanaged. There are hundreds of different variables to consider, each of which must be mapped out to identify interdependencies. Some applications may need some development work to become cloud-ready and everything must be timed perfectly to prevent major disruptions to your operations.

Creating a thorough, comprehensive cloud implementation plan is no easy feat but fortunately, specialists are available who can give consultancy advice to ensure your migration is successful.

Getting a consultant on-board for your cloud migration can help you draw up a plan that carries you through your migration and ensures the end solution delivers on your business objectives. All without embarrassing and costly mistakes on the journey.

Choosing an experienced consultant de-risks the project and enables you to get assistance beyond just preliminary advice. This can include setting out the business case and getting stakeholder buy-in, through to the actual implementation of your solution. Experienced consultants are there to take responsibility for your business outcomes.

Even for businesses with an internal IT team in place, it’s often not feasible to have them perform the migration. They may have the technical capabilities, but the experience of delivering multiple cloud migrations will typically allow a consultant to deliver a better business result faster, at a reduced cost and without the levels of risk.

An internal IT team can certainly be involved in the whole migration process, but by working alongside a vastly experienced cloud architect they can deliver truly impactful results and grow themselves at the same time.

2. Choosing a supplier based solely on price

As one benefit of the cloud is how it can deliver an enterprise-class IT solution whilst saving money on infrastructure and running costs, it’s tempting to just choose the absolute cheapest supplier and call it a deal.

However, the cheapest suppliers often struggle with project delivery and lack the knowledge for important areas such as troubleshooting and capacity planning. These failings can easily mount up and ultimately jeopardise the migration, reduce the performance of the solution or eliminate any cost savings.

Ultimately, IT should be seen as an investment, as it is an investment at the core of your business. If you’re migrating your entire IT environment, you want to ensure that you’re getting value in terms of support, resilience, flexibility and advice beyond the initial sale. Otherwise poor performance, downtime and redundant spend can quickly overtake any initial savings.

Along with price, you should also be checking the service level agreement (SLA) a provider is offering. A 99% uptime guarantee sounds good but is actually on the lower end of the spectrum for quality. You don’t want to be suffering outage after outage without any come-back against your supplier.

3. Lacking a concrete goal

Undertaking a cloud migration is not in itself a strategic business objective. Migration must be done to achieve a business outcome. Failing to have a concrete case for why you are choosing cloud can easily lead to a failed project in terms of tangible results.

Being unclear on the true drivers of change can actually leave you in a more restricted state with increased costs. So you need to know why you are migrating to the cloud and whether there’s a better alternative far before you begin considering implementing a solution.

We covered how your strategic objectives can influence what you should migrate in the third part of our cloud migration series which you can find here.

But in short, if you want to reduce costs and improve flexibility you could utilise cloud-hosted servers or desktops instead of building, supporting, maintaining and securing traditional on-premise solutions. If you want to increase efficiency and collaboration you can consider migrating to Office 365 to take advantage of applications such as Teams and Yammer. To improve reliability, you could deploy cloud-based replicas of key systems. And to improve performance you can migrate desktops or servers to a powerful cloud platform.

4. Underestimating storage requirements

Knowing exactly how much data your business has which needs to be transferred over in migration is an important factor needing consideration. It’s very easy to underestimate the quantities a typical business has and failing to factor in growth patterns is an equally common mistake. Although the cloud is highly scalable in its storage ability, needing to resize early on can lead to unanticipated costs and reduce the efficacy of your migration.

But size isn’t the only factor to consider. The speed of the storage is an equally, if not more, important factor to look at. As it’s directly tied to the performance of your applications and files stored in the cloud. This is an area where an inexperienced consulting firm will typically let you down as they’re unable to ensure their cloud platform delivers the performance you require at the cost you expect.

5. Not checking the provider’s security

Your cyber-security is only as strong as your weakest supplier. If you choose a cloud provider who can’t prove that they have taken their security seriously then you’re putting your data at risk, probably your customers data and certainly your reputation.

To avoid choosing a provider with poor security, at the bare minimum ensure that they’re ISO 27001 certified. ISO 27001 is the world-leading industry standard for information security management. It’s no small undertaking so indicates that the provider takes security seriously.

Do be aware though that some providers will state that they “use an ISO 27001 certified cloud platform”. This does not mean that they are certified themselves, just that the platform they are using is certified. It’s a big difference. Ideally, the whole chain should be compliant, otherwise, much of the benefit is negated. So make sure the provider themselves have achieved the certification and not just the platform they are using.

6. Being unprepared

It’s important to check your business is ready for a cloud migration before undertaking one. There are several factors influencing how ready your business is for migration including business size, company culture and Internet connection. You can read more about this in part #3 of the Cloud Migration Guide.

Once you’ve determined which area you want to migrate, based on the business case, you’ll need an implementation plan. This should document exactly what, how, when and in what order you’re going to migrate.

Additionally, flexible roll back and testing plans are imperative to ensure you can get back to a stable state quickly, should things go awry.

7. Taking things too fast

Most industry experts agree that it’s not a case of “if” your business should move to the cloud, but “when”. But, you still shouldn’t rush to migrate everything at once or have unrealistic time goals.

Migrating to an entirely new platform is a big undertaking and rushing in can get you into trouble. You need to have an implementation plan, based on experience and specifically tailored for your organisation.

Doing an all-at-once forklift migration without proper planning can lead to horrendous issues for your business. Businesses try to go to the cloud in one jump and regret it – typically because they’ve rushed testing. Failing to test the environment under load and not ensuring every aspect of the workflows continue to function can destroy the performance, creating further productivity problems.

In the main, being lax on testing is the biggest cause of failure of IT projects. You need a full testing plan, buy-in and sign-off from all departments to ensure a smooth and orderly transition.

Want more information on the cloud?

• What is a cloud migration? – Part #1 of 4
• Risks and rewards of cloud migration – Part #2 of 4
• Are you ready for cloud migration? – Part #3 of 4

There are very few businesses that would see zero benefits from the cloud.

In fact, it’s expected that the clear majority of businesses will use cloud services in the next few years. With a considerable proportion of them having a 100% cloud-based environment. However, like all projects, there’s the best time to undertake a migration.

There are four main factors determining if your business is ready for cloud migration. These are:

• Internet connection
• Business size
• Company growth goals

How much they influence the cloud-readiness is roughly in the order they appear.

1. How Internet connection affects cloud readiness

Cloud is reliant on the Internet or a leased private network connection (we’ll just refer to it as an Internet connection for simplicity). If your Internet connection fails, then whatever is being stored or hosted on a cloud platform will become inaccessible until the connection is restored. Therefore, you should only consider a cloud migration if your current Internet connection can support the increased load it’ll bear.

If you’re a large firm with an Internet connection which is good but already under heavy load, you should consider upgrading. The added burden of cloud traffic could cause your connection speed to slow down due to all available bandwidth being used up.

As well as certifying you have a suitable Internet connection, you need to ensure your connection won’t have issues. Assuming leased Internet connections are immune to outages is a dangerous mistake. Leased lines go down. And when they do, they’ll typically be down for a long time.

Installing a backup Internet connection with another provider to your main one is vital to ensure constant connectivity to your cloud.  Ideally, it will also come into your building from a physically separate direction. If you don’t yet have two Internet connections, you can still undertake a migration. But getting a backup line should become a high priority.

2. How business size affects cloud readiness

Generally, the smaller the businesses, the more suitable it is to migrate into the cloud and the readier it is. This is for two main reasons.

Firstly, a large business needs to do more preparation before undertaking a migration. There are more workstations, more files, more hardware, complex applications and workloads which all need to be migrated. This needs precise planning and testing.

A small business comparably may only have a single server, less than 50 workstations, a few applications and 2 or 3 terabytes of data between all their users. This can be migrated much easier and has a much lower cost and risk overhead associated with it.

Secondly, the positive impact of the cloud being a subscription is more pertinent for smaller businesses than bigger ones. Large firms may have the heavyweight IT teams already in place and can run their own private clouds within their own data centres, or at least manage them in others. And if the cloud platform charges per user, access to the cloud service can become expensive after factoring in several thousand users.

For small and mid-sized businesses though, the subscription specifically means they can gain access to all of the same applications and benefits that the big firms have but they don’t pay any of the associated costs. They simply reap the benefits of economies of scale without any of the complexities and overheads, including ongoing management and support.

This doesn’t mean large businesses can’t gain benefits from the cloud. Large businesses can very easily reap great rewards from a cloud migration but it’s a much larger undertaking, in terms of planning and the migration process itself.  The ROI timescales may also be longer.

3. How business growth goals affect cloud readiness

The broad applicability of cloud means that regardless of what specific areas you want to foster growth in, cloud migration is likely able to help. However, depending on your goals, what parts of your current infrastructure or systems should be migrated first can change. Here are a few examples to consider:

Increase flexibility

To achieve a goal of improved flexibility, you should consider hosted desktop or migrating servers over to cloud hosting. This gives you access to an enterprise-grade IT platform that you can scale up, down or out with ease. You can open a new office anywhere in the world or add a new employee with all their applications in minutes.

Save money

If you aim to save money with cloud migration, any type of migration can help. But for a large impact, you should consider moving expensive-to-buy and run hardware and applications such as central servers (file, mail, web, backup, ERP, CRM) to a replica hosted in the cloud. This cuts down on the operating costs and can save money on the costs of buying, running supporting and managing the environment in your own business.

Increase productivity

To increase business productivity and boost efficiency, you might consider migrating from the standard Office suite to Office 365. It comes with a range of benefits for any business such as added functionality, security and greatly improved internal and external collaboration features that all promote better workflows and improved business processes.

Improve reliability

If you intend to improve the reliability of your business, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) can help in that regard. You can have a full replica of your IT environment sitting in the cloud-ready to go should disaster strike at a fraction of the historical costs.

What else should you consider?

It’s important to understand that the cloud is not a golden chalice, nor the only way to run your IT infrastructure and systems.

Too often businesses state that they have a strategic objective to move to the cloud. This is not a business objective. Perhaps the business wants to prepare for expansion and needs greater flexibility, but don’t just move to the cloud for the sake of it.

Typically, except for small businesses, the greatest business results can be gained from working in a hybrid environment. This is in effect a mix of cloud and on-premise solutions.

It’s also important to note that cloud migration is not a single leap. It’s a process where different applications and workloads are moved over one at a time. Rushing migrations for the sake of moving to the cloud can be disastrous.

The final part of the Cloud Migration Guide looks at the biggest pitfalls businesses face when trying to migrate. Learn how to prevent your migration from falling into these same traps.

See also:

• What is a cloud migration? – Part #1 of 4
• Risks and rewards of cloud migration – Part #2 of 4
• How to achieve cloud migration success – Part #4 of 4

Choosing to migrate some or all your business systems to the cloud can provide a significant return on investment. However, as it is with all significant IT projects, cloud migration is not without its risks, whether moving into a private cloud or a public cloud, such as Microsoft Azure

But just because there are risks doesn’t mean that you should shun the idea of cloud migration. Gartner predicts that by 2020, businesses with a no cloud policy will be as rare as businesses with a no Internet policy. So avoiding the cloud will almost certainly leave you behind your competitors.

Instead of focusing solely on the risks, an equal amount of emphasis needs to be put on the benefits of cloud migration and the ways in which the risks can easily be mitigated.

Reward: Reduces upfront costs

The CapEx requirements for the infrastructure which supports standard IT – disaster recovery, live backup, central file, mail and web servers, not to mention security – can be significant.

As a result, growing businesses may find it difficult to make the investments required to compete in their field. The high costs can also lead to sweating assets beyond their usable life, causing productivity and potentially business continuity issues. Fortunately, though, the cloud has brought enterprise-class IT solutions to the masses.

Cloud is sold as a service, meaning instead of an uncompromising upfront fee, monthly usage fees are paid instead. A subscription is much more manageable for expanding businesses as it allows them to budget their IT requirements simply, as a monthly expense, rather than getting into chunky and changing investment cycles.

The scalability of the cloud also means that you simply pay for what you use, rather than over purchasing and having expensive resources sat idle. It also saves businesses from underinvesting now and having to catch up later. In essence, spending twice.

Risk: Reliant on a third party’s security

The most common and long-held fear about the cloud is security. When your data is under the protection of someone else, how do you ensure they uphold the strict security policies, frameworks and management policies as you?

This is a genuine concern and it’s unfortunate that there are cloud providers who don’t take security seriously. There are several ways to assess the security of a provider though. Ranging from inspecting the premises to asking them to provide certifications. You should expect ISO 27001 as a minimum.

Testimonials are another way of gauging how good a provider is. You’ll never be shown a negative testimonial though, so ask some further questions to find out more. Ask to what security standards they operate, what their SLA is and what backs it up, where their data centres are, what the exit policy is, who has access to the stored data and what happens in the event of a breach. If you’re unsure, ask. A good provider will give you a straight answer as it should be considered standard information.

If a provider can’t prove they will protect your data, even if they’re half the price of the competition, don’t risk it. The money you ‘save’ is likely to be outstripped by the financial and reputational damage incurred following a data breach.

Reward: Improved performance

The hardware which cloud providers use to power their cloud service tends to be high-performance. For example, using fast-access flash storage over much slower magnetic storage to increase file access speed and having modern generation processors to speed up nearly every operation done by the machine.

This means that switching to a cloud service, such as a hosted desktop setup, can deliver increased workstation performance without a hardware upgrade and should thus also enhance productivity.

Furthermore, the scalable nature of the cloud means that even when more load is added (for example, more users logging in as the morning progresses), performance will not decrease because resources will flex to accommodate this.

This lets systems constantly run at peak performance, whilst you are only paying for what you’re using.

Risk: Migration can be mismanaged

Choosing to undertake a cloud migration without fully understanding why you’re doing it causes all sorts of problems.

Firstly, you need to establish what the end goal for the project is. It’s important that you think long-term here and don’t let short-term factors, such as upfront costs, cloud your thoughts. Once you have your goals in mind, you can work out what needs to be done at each stage of the project to achieve it. Use this to map out a cloud strategy – a vital piece of documentation for navigating the complexity of migration.

Secondly, you need to make sure the whole business is on board. Cloud migrations will affect many areas, so it’s vital that you’re fully invested in the process and that you obtain buy-in for the initiative from department heads and the board. Drive, direction and support from the most senior level of the business will give those in charge of the project the necessary authority to make changes. Whilst keeping employees informed throughout the project will make them feel involved and give a much more positive outlook on any associated changes to processes.

Finally, once you have a clear vision and buy-in from across the business, the next step is engaging with the right cloud services provider. For a smooth transition, you’ll be looking for a provider with the required experience and capabilities to not only deliver the technical aspects of the solution but to help you achieve your desired business goals.

To achieve this, you’ll want to look for a cloud services provider with a significant and positive experience with cloud migrations. However, your business also has a responsibility to communicate clearly with the provider in terms of your end goals. Providing a clear brief and engaging in a two-way transparent conversation increases the chance of successful migration and one which runs as close to time and budget as possible.

Reward: Enables agile working

Agile working is dismissed by some as a passing trend and has been banned outright by some firms. But even if you aren’t keen on working from home, agile working is a much wider area and has the potential to deliver a greatly enhanced and productive working environment

Migrating applications and services to the cloud can help employees to remain productive whether they’re at a client site, travelling, attending a meeting or working from home. It’s particularly beneficial for multi-site businesses with remote workers, as cloud deployments can streamline access to applications and data, ensuring consistency across all channels.

For example, using cloud-based Office 365 you could have Sales and Procurement simultaneously working on a proposal and pricing document together or you could use Microsoft Teams to host a virtual meeting with the Heads of Departments from each office.

Risk: Added latency

Have you ever had trouble loading a web-based application? Or found aeons passing as you waited for a file to upload to storage? Perhaps your screen has frozen for a few seconds when working on an application? These problems can arise because the back-end IT cloud platform doesn’t have enough grunt, resources in essence. It can also be caused by not having enough bandwidth on your local Internet connection. These delays (also known as latency) causes frustration for end-users and ultimately costs the enterprise.

Latency, when it’s severe and persistent, dramatically reduces productivity and can quite quickly destroy morale. If you’re pressing a key, then waiting for several seconds for that keystroke to register (the result of high latency) then that’s a lot of time being lost over the course of a day.

The solution to this problem is to ensure that the cloud platform has been designed and built correctly before you perform a full migration to the cloud. Your new environment should be rigorously tested under load to ensure it can and will perform when things get busy, both now and in the future. Also, make sure you have sufficient and reliable Internet connections in place prior to a move.

Reward: Enables business continuity

Business Continuity and Disaster recovery were once significant investments for any firm, in terms of time as well as money. The ongoing management of the system was heavy and expensive, continually updating policies and procedures was a nightmare and soon led to the whole DR and/or Business Recovery Plan becoming redundant.

Cloud-based disaster recovery and continuity have slashed the cost and past hassles of ensuring a business can respond to incidents or complete disasters. It’s also brought down the time-to-recover from days down to minutes. This is possible through creating a cloud-hosted copy of all or core parts of a business’s IT environment, which is always up-to-date and can be failed over and back with ease.

The true beauty of cloud-based solutions to continuity and disaster recovery is that they are always available and can be isolated and tested at any time. You can also automate testing, daily if you like, to ensure you are protected.

Reward: Reduced operating costs

Not only are the upfront costs reduced when undertaking a cloud migration but so are operating costs. It’s estimated that a single server uses 500 – 1,200 watts per hour to run. Extrapolated over a day, a month, a year, these basic running costs grow rapidly. But they are a cost that can be transferred to increase the ROI of moving to a cloud environment.

By hosting server environments in the cloud instead, the cloud provider will be the one covering all the costs of power, cooling, security and other areas. Whilst that is incorporated into the monthly fee, it will be just a fraction of the cost of delivering the same function internally. You are gaining the benefit of economies of scale, shared between you, others and the cloud provider.

Furthermore, with the cloud, there’s no need to have the IT team focus on just ‘keeping the lights on’. They can focus back on the business, working on enhancement projects, rather than being concerned about the day to day of running the back-end of an IT environment.

Are you ready to begin your cloud migration?

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Part 3 of the Cloud Migration Guide goes into depth on the main factors determining if your business is ready for the cloud. As well as how your business objectives influence what type of cloud migration you should undertake. Read part 3 here.

See also:

• Part 1: What is a cloud migration?
• Part 3: Are you ready for cloud migration?
• Part 4: How to achieve cloud migration success