How to avoid the pitfalls of cloud migration

As businesses seek competitive advantage and look to scale, the Cloud can increasingly make the difference. Cloud migration offers several tangible businesses benefits, including better ROI, scalability, control over IT and app deployment, facilitating faster innovation.

Bulky servers, located in-house, running organisational software are a remnant of the past. They are slow, unscaleable, vulnerable to attack, and expensive to maintain and upgrade.

Cloud migration allows businesses to farewell their old servers, and deploy business software and applications from anywhere, freeing up capital, space, and time.

The Cloud transforms IT from a cost centre to a revenue driver by facilitating growth. It can be efficiently scaled and aids real-time collaboration for Agile, competitive operations.

However, the failure rate for Cloud migrations is high, between 30 to 50 per cent. Unsuccessful attempts are sometimes due to inadequate planning because the project manager has headed into migration without a clear roadmap or strategy. Happily, the majority of businesses can enjoy the benefits of a successful Cloud migration thanks to strategic partners which can help assess, plan, stage, and manage every aspect.

The stages of successful Cloud migration Cloud migration isn’t only about the migration. To achieve optimal storage, networking, and deployment to deliver enterprise resource planning (ERP) takes careful assessment and staging.

Businesses need a solid strategy, good design, staged deployment, adequate management, and impenetrable security for Cloud success.

A premier partner helps businesses assess current and future IT needs, calculate the cost, and develop a future-proof Cloud roadmap, and optimise existing applications and infrastructure.

Once a strategy has been developed, design follows. A partner will develop an architecture best suited to requirements, undertake ROI comparisons, and provide proof of concept.

Deployment is undertaken in phases. Starting small, a partner will migrate enterprise apps, and then check configuration, security and functionality, before scaling up. This includes training of key team members for seamless management.

The Cloud is only as effective as its management. A good partner will help businesses become cloud-native to deliver maximum application value and security. Management must include security and back up for minimal down time and swift recovery. For this ‘always on’ customer service and constant support is key.

Security is vital. Cloud infrastructure ensures best in class firewalls, for data loss prevention, constant threat intelligence and monitoring, and swift recovery for high availability.

Case study

Prior to launching Cloud Comrade in 2014, its founders had used servers, storage, networking, and associated systems to deliver enterprise resource planning (ERP) to its clients.

Many of these systems were based on SAP ERP software, in particular SAP Business One. However, this required clients to make substantial up-front investments in infrastructure without knowing the size of future workloads.

Plus, it was slow; the customer onboarding process could take up to two weeks; and if an incident or outage occurred, clients sometimes had to wait for replacement components or systems to be ordered and installed.

Cloud Comrade knew SAP applications were mission-critical and needed to be available at least 99.95 per cent of the time for its clients.

As Cloud services matured, clients were increasingly willing to migrate over to better control costs. So Cloud Comrade decided to deliver its SAP Business One HANA service to customers from the Cloud.

Cloud Comrade had already partnered with AWS previously, and AWS was one of the first Cloud providers to have data centres and regions in Singapore. This gave customers confidence the SAP Business One service would be delivered nearby, minimising latency and service disruptions.

However, the size of the AWS virtual instances needed to run SAP Business One powered by the SAP HANA in-memory database made the service too costly for many clients. Cloud Comrade overcame this problem by delivering a multi-tenant platform on AWS, which enables its clients to access all the features and functions of SAP Business One running on SAP HANA.

The platform went live in 2016, comprising of compute, storage, and domain name system services in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. As of mid-2017, the business had onboarded 1,000 customers, and is enjoying ongoing growth thanks to the ability to scale. 

Cloud migration is complex and is only as effective as the strategy and management underpinning it.

Cloud Comrade has helped 300 customers’ Cloud journeys, focusing on business process improvement, infrastructure optimisation, and security.

Cloud Comrade, a premier consulting partner of AWS, ensures customers benefit from best-in-class experience for mission or non-mission critical applications, and is the first Singapore-headquartered company, and second company headquartered in ASEAN, to receive AWS’ premier partner designation.

Customer benefits include seamless management from strategy to deployment and security, and ROI planning, meaning some have reduced infrastructure costs by more than 30 per cent while maintaining performance and availability levels. 

Cloud Comrade is dedicated to working with leading global Cloud providers to ensure ASEAN-based companies remain competitive with their global peers. 

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