Some might say it’s cheeky or self-indulgent to bring Star Wars into a blog post about cloud migration just because it’s being published on May the 4th. But, what the heck? It’s fun, and if it gets a reader’s attention and motivates them to migrate and modernize their business, then the gratuitous nod to the Lucas epic may be justified.

 

The cloud is transforming IT — improving performance, adding new capabilities, and driving down costs. Yet, for enterprises with decades of investment in legacy IT, migration can be complex. However, Google Cloud (GCP) can jumpstart your cloud migration faster than the Millennium Falcon can leap to hyperspace.

 

Google Cloud Awakens

Cloud migration remains a challenge for many businesses. In fact, according to a study by Dimensional Data, nearly two-thirds of migration projects prove very difficult or fail. These shortfalls are varied but include lack of budget, poor migration planning, adoption resistance, and lack of skills. At an InfoWorld conference in 2018, David Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting, elaborated on the challenges, “Where cloud projects fail is not so much about the cloud selection but about picking the wrong workloads to migrate and not paying attention to security, governance, and other core services.”

 

Because of these challenges, the simplicity of Google Cloud is quickly making it a dominant force (pun intended) in enterprise IT. GCP’s purpose-built, enterprise-grade migration solution gets workloads up and running in the cloud within minutes while minimizing risk, eliminating manual labor, and cutting costs. With this end-to-end approach, businesses reach the finish line up to 10x faster according to the company, regardless of their application landscape.

Planning A Migration

If you’re rethinking your cloud priorities in 2021, you’re not alone. Google Cloud teamed up with IDG to learn how all of 2020’s changes and challenges have altered IT leaders’ approaches—and the answer is a dramatic shift in the way organizations are tackling their digital transformation. Here are just a few highlights:

 

• 59% of respondents accelerated or added remote working and collaboration capabilities in 2020.
• 78% of respondents said big data analysis capabilities are a significant consideration for the cloud provider they choose
• 78% of respondents want a provider that offers multicloud and/or hybrid cloud support.

 

Successful migrations start by taking stock of what needs to be moved and prioritizing the transfer, so your business doesn’t have to slow down. Briefly, here’s a summary of the steps that Google recommends for a successful cloud migration:

 

 

Assess: Develop an understanding of your Cloud. Organize your information and your teams around the project and then pin down precisely what needs to migrate. StratoZone is a great free tool that can help with these activities.

 

Plan: This where you’ll start to sort applications by migration effort, model discovery information, and pre-validate each migration. 

 

Migrate: Whether you’re doing a lift-and-shift or some modified form of it, your goal here is to run your applications in the Cloud. An experienced partner can help with this stage and ensure that you’ve transferred and synchronized all of your applications and data.

 

Optimize: While the heavy lifting is over, you’re not entirely done. Now that you’ve successfully migrated to the Cloud, you’ll want to rightsize for performance rather than defaulting to one-to-one mapping from on-prem to cloud.

 

Obviously, these are high-level steps, and the challenges in terms of scale, complexity, and risk increase with bigger organizations. Minimizing disruption when you migrate is crucial to every stakeholder, so having a plan in place that uses an established approach is critical.

 

The Cloud Is Strong With This Team

WALT Labs is here to help your organization’s digital transformation journey with personalized guidance and support. Our migration solutions can shave time and minimize the intrusiveness of the migration process. So, if you’re considering a move, contact us today for a no-obligation cloud assessment. And, may the force be with you.