For large enterprises undertaking a migration program, it can be a costly and challenging exercise. With no guarantees that you will arrive at a better end state compared to where you started.
Whether it is uplifting legacy technology assets or planning data centre migrations to private or public cloud (or a hybrid) – Here are 6 tips to help plan a successful migration.
1. Start with the problem
Too often, IT picks a solution because it is in vogue or because peers use it.
When IT aligns with business needs, it can design technology around business goals, not the other way around.
The goals may be to better control costs, to support business growth (or downsizing), or to allow your enterprise applications to be accessible by authorised users, securely and anywhere.
2. Virtualise
If you still run legacy systems on bare metal, your migration options shrink. You also lose orchestration and automation opportunities.
Migrating from legacy can be a challenge (although most cloud providers offer Mainframe emulators), but it can be overcome by splitting the client piece (front end that your users interact with) and the back end (which is maybe harder to move or virtualise).
3. Where are we now?
It may seem crazy, but most medium to large organisations struggle to see what their IT environment looks like today. Pick a server at random and ask the SME what team/project is using that and why, and you may get a blank stare.
Teams often keep this knowledge in spreadsheets and emails, so it is only true at a point in time. Effective planning of your migration requires a deep appreciation of your current IT fabric & the underlying relationships.
How does an individual DB server relate to a business process, and what is the impact of change on this server to the wider business, and who are the stakeholders? Does this business process traverse multiple interdependent systems? Understanding your current IT fabric is a foundation for a successful migration program.
4. Where are we going?
Armed with knowledge of where you currently are, you can begin to plan a future state based on your business goals. This may lead to an end state of hybrid public and private cloud. With the vision in place, you can now start to slice the migration into sprints of activity.
One strategy is to focus on lower environments one at a time, i.e., look at your lower environment for a system, ‘System x DEV Instance’. Decide whether this is a ‘lift and shift’ (if possible) or a ‘build new and decommission old’.
A migration program is a great opportunity to identify and permanently decommission unused/idle systems and start reducing your future OPEX.
5. Orchestrate and Automate
Each critical manual step to decommission and spin up a new server should be a target for automation. Each sprint then feeds lessons learned and new automation into the next one.
As a result, by the time you migrate critical production, you have tested, automated steps that minimize human error.
You can then reuse these scripts in your auto-scaling strategy to add resources when demand rises.
6. Align technology costs with the business
A migration is a great chance to start fresh. In particular, you can learn who uses what and what each service costs.
This does not necessarily mean introducing a clunky chargeback model, but there is tremendous power in presenting dollar figures to the business team for the cost of providing the IT service.
Most business units will not object to paying for what they use. After all, if IT aligns with business needs, higher IT cost means the business is doing well.
On the flip side, the business will be quite vocal in ensuring that they are not paying for the things they do not use. e.g. If an end-to-end environment sits idle 90% of the time, make sure it only runs for the other 10%.
This cuts waste and improves value. It also acts as an ongoing check that IT stays aligned with the business.
More information on leveraging ‘EcoSystem Migration Center’ to plan, model and execute a migration program can be found here. If you would like to talk to one of our solution consultants to discuss in more detail, please reach out to us on our contact page.
