Digital Success Through Business-Centric Agile Cloud Migration

IDG’s 2018 Cloud Computing Survey¹ report finds that the top business objectives driving investment in cloud include accelerating IT service delivery (71%), greater flexibility to react to changing market conditions (63%), and improving customer support (57%). Despite the extensive adoption of cloud services, some organizations have encountered unforeseen complexities in migrating workloads to the cloud. To overcome the technological challenges, we believe organizations need to proceed with greater agility and process rigor than ever before.  

Service-led ‘factory’ approach for a fit business

To be competitive in the digital era, migrating applications and data to the cloud must be a routine, industrial activity, which business and IT can launch quickly and effectively. A factory approach will offer better choices in all things cloud, be they service providers, or applications to migrate, or security controls, or compliance and performance requirements.

For example, when a customer complains about a missed delivery, the event might trigger an update to the CRM system hosted in the AWS cloud, which will need inputs from different applications that track shipping, inventory, billing, order replacement, etc. This way, each business service comprises a complex mix of applications running both within and outside the enterprise, and a failure of any of them can put the brakes on the business processes. A service-led factory approach helps enterprises understand the dependencies among these applications and migrate them to the AWS cloud with minimal business impact.

Agile cloud migration factory

An agile cloud migration factory approach breaks down the planning, execution and optimization of a cloud migration into a series of strictly defined processes through scrums. Each scrum focuses on specific elements of the migration, with strong checks and balances at every stage. All steps, from blueprinting to service creation and testing to data transfer, are performed in parallel, with a fail-fast approach to expedite transition to the hybrid cloud platform while improving migration quality.

Cloud migration best practices

Here are some best practices that have helped organizations to apply an agile cloud migration factory approach:

• Accelerate automated provisioning with a catalog of operationalized cloud design patterns.
• Coordinate with operational, support and change teams, and avoid surprising users with unwanted downtime, without interfering with their existing projects.
• Define up front the cloud migration approach needed — focus on an infrastructure-based, platform-based or service-based methodology.
• Engage early with all stakeholders — total financial and political support is a must.
• Learn how the move to the cloud will affect the cost of licenses for applications and underlying platforms such as databases.
• Ensure your approach meets regulations in the new environment, such as the European Union’s GDPR.

An industrial cloud for the digital era is here

As the pivot to digital drives growth and innovation, AWS cloud offers organizations a proven approach to reducing costs and speeding the delivery of new applications across the enterprises. This approach arms the business with a continuous stream of new products and services. As Stephen Orban, Head of Enterprise Strategy at AWS, says, “Migrating IT portfolios to the cloud is only the beginning of what’s possible.” ²

Poorly conceived cloud migration projects can run into millions of dollars over several months or even years and threaten an organization’s competitiveness and growth. It is thus imperative to have a critical view of mere IT plumbing and adopt a more holistic business-centric approach to cloud adoption.

To learn more about Cognizant’s Cloud Migration factory, click here or write to AWSsome@Cognizant.com.

¹ IDG 2018 Cloud Computing Survey – Executive Summary

² Migrating to AWS: Best Practices and Strategies