In a recent interview, I discussed the pros and cons of migrating to a public cloud, stating that nobody prepares appropriately for a migration of a live application that’s in place already. We all think it’s too easy to migrate that key Virtual Machine instance to public clouds with the multitude of tools available today which makes us complacent with the perceived ease of Cloud Computing. However, in reality, moving that key application that resides on a virtual infrastructure is not easy at all and more often than makes the migration process fail!
I have seen migrations of a primary application to a Public cloud environment go well but also very very badly, making me a skeptic. However, after reading some interesting statistics that include Public cloud in the enterprise it does seem that large corporates are increasingly comfortable utilising public cloud infrastructure as a service.
“According to a recent JP Morgan survey of more than 200 CIOs of large enterprises, “16.2% of workloads are currently running in the public cloud, and in five years 41.3% of workloads will run in a public cloud”. If that’s the case in 5 years, what will happen in a decade? As AWS becomes a $14B business and Azure’s market share continues to grow, enterprises are leveraging the public cloud more and more each year.”
However, even though self-provisioning of new workloads on AWS or Azure is simple, migration of a running service to the cloud requires more planning. It’s a common perception that migrating existing workloads to public cloud—especially those with a lot of data—must be complex, time-consuming and risky. But Enterprise IT organisations are rapidly establishing good migration practices, and migration technology are evolving quickly to support them.
[easy-tweet tweet=”Velostrata migration software is agentless” hashtags=”CloudMigration,Cloud”]
Velostrata, a provider of cloud migration software, had a lot to say about this and even provided us with a “Public Cloud Check Sheet” that can be to be used when planning your migration. The firm also has one special ingredient that I have not seen elsewhere, a USP if you like – Their migration software is agentless, yes you did read that right! The below graphic is taken from their website where you can find some amazing information on migrations in general and not just about their products.
It seems like I was wrong with being a sceptic. However, I think that maybe a trial of the toolset would be beneficial to most enterprise firms to see it in action. And…they also provide a test environment that ensures you get it right before when you eventually press that green button!
Velostrata’s guide to public cloud migrations can be found here! https://velostrata.com/cloud-migration/
Neil Cattermull, Director of Cloud Practice, Compare the Cloud
Neil's focus is on developing cloud technology and big data. You can often find him advising CXOs on cloud strategy.