In the past few years cloud adoption has increased significantly, as it provides considerable value over traditional datacenters—achieving greater scalability, cost efficiency, and improved performance.

Many organizations are now looking to quickly take advantage of this value by migrating their existing applications and workloads. But cloud migration requires careful planning and strategy. One of the keys to cloud success is to determine the optimal platform and priorities for running business applications. Once considered optional, these applications are now central to infrastructure decisions and achieving company goals.

To enable successful migration, it’s important to have a strong plan in place that covers the end-cloud environment, training, and, most importantly, the readiness of your workloads and applications. To do this, you need to determine how to successfully create the initial technical plans and business justification, ensure your workloads will run as expected, and perform the migration with limited impact on the business.

Click each of the 5 R’s below to learn more.

“One of our big objectives was to eliminate $3 million in capital costs over about three years, and to reduce our operating costs by approximately the same amount. At the same time, we wanted to improve our quality of service. With Azure, we’re confident that we’ll meet those goals.”

Jim Slattery – Chief Financial Officer | Capstone Mining

Why Migrate Now?

At first glance migration may seem like a technical decision, but at its core this is a business decision. Ultimately, it begs a fundamental question: what’s driving your business to migrate to the cloud, and why now?

The benefits of cloud are universal—reduced running costs, faster modernization capabilities, and increased security. But often, specific initiators first kick off the discussion within an organization, including:

Application Development & Modernization

If you’re in the software business, your resources are probably spread thin. And using on-premises platforms is likely not enabling you to adopt modern services. The cloud provides an integrated platform for modern development, where development teams can increase speed by up to 33 percent.

Ultimately, by migrating your current environment to the cloud, you’re putting yourself in a better position to accelerate your business. By reducing costs and making management more efficient, a cloud platform can immediately impact your IT group’s ability to invest back into core strategic projects, increasing security and reliability while advancing application development.

Operational efficiencies and reduction of operating expenses

Due to the reduction in hardware support, increased manageability, and efficiency of process, you can save an average of 20 to 30 percent on virtual machine (VM) resource configuration alone.

Decreased time to market/release

By reducing management overhead and freeing up budget, you can focus more time and effort on rapid software and solution development. Faster deployment of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) will enable your business to release faster and more often.

Support for scalability requirements that are more cost effective

When you have to plan for peak usage through on-premises systems, most of the time you’re left with servers that are running at less than 20 percent utilization. The cloud releases organizations from this model, enabling a scale-when-you-need-it approach.

Renewal of datacenter or hardware leasing

If you’re currently extending your budget on renewing hardware or paying for datacenter locations for hosting, this is the perfect time to look toward cloud migration. The cloud can make these necessities a thing of the past by enabling a cloud vendor to host these services for you.

Renewal of licensing

Nearly everyone has an annual licensing agreement with their major IT providers. These too require ample budget to ensure your virtualization and OS platform are sufficiently covered. The cloud can help you here, providing a pay-as-you-go offering to reduce this cost.

How Do I Approach Cloud Migration?

Sometimes cloud migration can be simple, with only a few decision points. However, your case may be more complex, depending on how many servers and virtual machines you use.

Your migration could require you to run parallel and iterative migration processes as you progressively move your applications and workloads to the cloud.

Whether your migration is simple or complex, it’s helpful to think of the basic elements of the process. Migration can be boiled down to three main phases, as illustrated in the model below.

We here at Oakwood are here to help walk you through this journey.