Cloud has become the de facto standard for modern IT. Companies of all sizes and from virtually every industry have tapped the cloud to take advantage of the many benefits it offers—including cost reduction, scalability, and quick, easy provisioning. As of 2017, 86% of all data center workloads have been moved to the cloud, according to Statista. By 2021, the percentage is expected to grow to 94%.
Multi-Cloud as the Middle Ground
Cloud migration is picking up speed this year, even for those companies using long-relied-on Oracle applications and databases, according to a recent survey of 300 IT professionals from Apps Associates. Almost nine in 10 IT decision-making professionals said that their senior management mandated a cloud adoption strategy this year, and it was a focus for the company. Nearly six in 10 reported they already had a formal, documented plan in place for adoption, while an additional 36% had less formalized plans or are making decisions in phases. The truth of the matter is, the clear majority of these decision-making professionals have already made the move or are actively planning for cloud migrations.
Unfortunately, there continues to be confusion around cloud migration best practices. The crowded market landscape and frenzy over the “cloud wars” in the media often present contradictory points of view, making it difficult for these IT decision makers to determine the most efficient pathway for their specific company. In fact, more than half say that while they know cloud is the way forward, they aren’t quite sure how to get there.
There are multiple cloud options to choose from—private, public, and multi-cloud—all of which are critical to business competitiveness. As the cloud landscape has grown and become more established, the process of selecting a cloud offering has gotten more closely tied to business goals and company preferences. Some businesses remain concerned about hosting their applications alongside thousands of others and elect to migrate to a private cloud to ensure a greater sense of control.
Many of these companies have spent years building their applications on-premise. These IT professionals typically appreciate the opportunity to be physically close to their key systems and applications and are not yet ready to move everything to the public cloud.
However, other enterprises have watched closely as cloud technology in public cloud offerings such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) has quickly advanced and matured. These decision makers often opt to select public cloud, because they believe the security precautions are as strong as what they might be able to provide in their own private cloud.
But whether public or private, over the past 5 years, it’s become glaringly clear that any company not moving at least some of its critical applications from on-premise environments will be left struggling to compete, especially in areas such as efficiency and flexibility. The desire to leave some key applications on-premise is what’s driving many companies to a multi-cloud model.
Multi-cloud can be defined simply. It’s when a company elects to locate its environment in more than one cloud platform. Multi-cloud offers a unique advantage for companies that are ready to put some of their applications up with the large providers but still want to have some applications segregated from the masses.
Top Three Considerations Before Launching a Cloud Migration Journey
Multi-cloud offers many benefits—in terms of documented security, compliance, and savings outcomes—but every migration presents challenges. Understanding best practices around how to successfully launch a multi-cloud migration journey is crucial to avoiding the common pitfalls along the way.
Here are three elements IT decision makers should consider before starting the cloud migration journey:
- Deeply Analyze the Environment
Create a holistic understanding of the company’s IT stack by fully mapping out the existing IT environment. This will include analyzing the technology, applications, and databases and determining what each serves and what is currently in use or left non-active. Often, IT decision makers may discover an opportunity to consolidate and improve the environment before even migrating. These consolidation efforts could be centered around reducing the number of employees managing information or removing unnecessary and unused environments.