News

You may be just starting your cloud journey, been doing it for over a year, or have already migrated a large number of services to cloud. While most IT organisations look to leverage cloud to free up IT resources, increase speed and reduce costs, they lack the critical capabilities to achieve these migrations in a seamless and optimized way.

Here are 7 steps to ensuring a cost effective, fast, and low risk approach to migrating your workloads to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud.

The first is to understand the assets and their relationships across the on-premise infrastructure, using agentless discovery. This approach is super-fast, helping you to gain complete visibility within 30 days.

Now we need to work out how much of these resources are consumed by the applications and services. This will help workout a migration path and priorities. And using advanced predictive analytics, we can also project the costs of running in the cloud to identify the most appropriate tariffs from cloud providers running your target workloads, without having left the comfort of your chair. Once you have finalised your migration priorities, the lifting & shifting can start using native automated techniques available by the cloud providers.

But our work is not done, yet. Although cloud provides huge flexibility and value, mastering and optimising running costs in the cloud can be tricky.

So, the next 3 capabilities are key in maintaining costs under control:

• Once in the cloud, workload optimisation assessment must continue to ensure services are optimally resourced and any wastage is eradicated.
• As the migration progresses, there is a continued need to focus on cloud cost. But be warned! This can be a seriously labour intensive activity.
• To address this, we use machine learning to identify anomalies and predict budget overruns before they happen. This will also help accounting department by reconciling cloud invoices with usage.

These 7-steps are relevant no matter where you are in your journey.

If you are just starting, naturally the focus is mostly on Discovery, Modelling and Forecasting. But as you progress with your migration initiative your requirements will naturally move on to cost optimisation, automation and identifying new candidates for migration.

Over the past 3 years we have worked very closely with BMC Software and major cloud providers, creating managed service offers spanning right across the steps we have just covered. And here are some proof-points:

• One of the world’s leading Oil companies optimised its on-premise SAP application footprint by 20% in preparation for migration to SAP Hana in the cloud.
• A large financial institution optimised resources utilisation across 3,500 servers as part of their journey to the cloud, resulting in 1.2 million pounds of savings.
• And a major European Bank used the modelling and forecasting capabilities to ensure 100% banking regulation compliance once migrated to the cloud, saving in excess of 1.5 million Euros.

In summary, for your cloud initiatives to work efficiently, define your objectives and where you intend to get to by adopting cloud. Clearly articulate the anticipated benefits – greater operational efficiency, flexibility, agility, increased revenue generation, reduced costs, enhanced security, better risk management, and so on.

Then use the 7-step plan to understand what you have, assess and prioritise your workload for migration, and ensure continued monitoring of cloud usage and costs.

Remove any one of these elements and the case for change will be much harder to make, or you’ll end up with a suite of cloud solutions that will cost more in total and may actually inhibit your agility.

In this video we will take a look at what is needed to accelerate cloud adoption. Watch now!

A-Z of Digital Acceleration

Fusion Global Business Solutions helps organizations improve their capabilities for accelerating their digital transformation programs. We offer a set of innovations focused on service management and service operations that help our customers gain the critical capabilities required to support their business activities. We truly believe that these services are unique across the industry and the purpose of these video recordings “The A-Z of Digital Acceleration” is to showcase some of these capabilities.

Just 7 steps to accelerate your cloud migration! Download the Whitepaper now and start your journey.

Getting Cloud Smart – 7 Steps to Start Managing Multi-Cloud Expenses