Deep Diving in the World of Data Warehousing
25 May 2016AWS Launches its Data Regions in Mumbai, India Enterprises
1 July 2016
Many businesses have started leveraging the cloud- whether private, public or hybrid. The main motivating factor for shifting to cloud for any organization is mainly to increase IT agility, accelerate time to market, reduce operational expenses, lower TCO and redundancy, and significantly increase disaster recovery capabilities. Like a whirlwind, cloud adoption is reaching critical masses, with adoption accelerating on daily basis. The result of which businesses are able to achieve massive growth. A recent research report from Gartner has proven that more than 70% of the CIOs have been thinking of migrating infrastructure to Cloud. Over the next 5 years, Gartner has predicted that there will be at least 44% annual growth in workloads for the cloud vs a much lower 8.9% growth for “on-premise” workloads. By 2019, nearly two-thirds of all workloads will be processed in the cloud. We will analyze various cloud migration strategy and me adopted by organizations and see how to optimize your cloud migration strategy.
Understanding the cost factor
Organizations today, should realize that there is no model which exists as one size fits all. To build a migration model for optimal efficiency, it’s important for organizations to effectively understand the cost optimizing of running “on-premise” applications, as well as the interim costs associated during the transition. Apart from this, they should also consider, how much will be the overall costs that organizations will be born when they scale up their infrastructure both on-premise as well as on cloud. On-premise data centers have costs associated with the servers, storage, networking, power, cooling, physical space and IT labor required to support applications and services running in the production environment. Many of these costs either get eliminated or reduced when applications are moved to the AWS platform, but it really helps to know the organizations current IT infrastructure and which applications will be profitable on moving to the cloud. Some of the questions that organizations should ponder before migrating from on-premise to cloud are:
Labor costs need to be aligned
How much amount is the business spending on maintaining the environment? This is an important question that organizations need to address as this is the major cost associated with on-premise servers. During the transition, existing staff will also need to collaborate and learn new skills and also in the meantime they need to continue to maintain the production environment. Many organizations lack the basic skill sets and expertise for migration to cloud and building a successful architecture. Thus, they require cloud consulting partners to streamline the migration of applications on the cloud.
Accurate mapping of Bandwidth
What will be the bandwidth the company will be required, what is the average bandwidth peak to average ratio, what will be the costs incurred when the infrastructure has to be scaled? This is very critical for organizations when migrating to the cloud as this help them plan their existing requirements when migrating to the cloud. If this is wrongly calculated, then it may result in either higher cost at the end of the billing cycle and may cause problems in the future when organizations want to scale.
Need to check for scalability
In on-premise systems every time the organization thinks of scaling (One of the predominant advantages of Cloud Migration!), they need to buy new servers or host it on third-party servers. This does not help as both the results of the solution in higher costs and waste of resources. Organizations need to plan beforehand as well so that they get time to research for the viability of these two options. This is the major advantage of the cloud as it results in eliminating the planning stage required to scale, but also it helps in lowering the overall costs associated with it. Organizations need to be careful while selecting a cloud service provider, they need to accurately to assess how much the costs they will be incurred when the business scales.
Take into consideration Disaster recovery
For organizations, it’s very critical that they have a proper Cloud Disaster recovery system well placed and set up, whether that be on-premise or on the cloud. The questions that Organizations need to ask are what was the power utility cost when on-premise? What happens when there are peak power requirements? How do they resolve the power issues currently? Have they accounted for 2N power? During the migration process this problem will arise multiple times and organizations also need to consider the double costs that they will incur vis-à-vis having their data on-premise as well as on the cloud. They also need to take into account the risks of losing the data if proper disaster recovery steps are not setup during migration. After the complete migration, organizations don’t face such problems as well costs come down. AWS has its own Data recovery system which ensures that businesses never lose their data.
Servers & Space
Having servers on-premise requires huge demand in terms of resources, whether it be cost or space. And if you are a growing business then, it becomes very difficult to manage the on-premise system which requires constant updating and you may need to buy more servers. Companies also need to consider the time of lease of their servers as that cost is one time which is usually very high. After migration on the cloud, all these costs won’t even exist and the resources managing them can be utilized efficiently. The only cost that the companies will face is that associated with tooling to automate the migration of data and virtual machines from on-premise to AWS.
Security
Another feature that organizations need to take into consideration while migrating from on-premise to cloud is security. Many organizations have data which cannot be made public and also cannot be shared with the third party, thus, that data has to be kept on-premise. Organizations need to ensure and accurately map, how much data has to be kept on-premise and how many servers will be required for the same. They also need to ensure that there are no applications hosted on the cloud which require or grant access to this data. Industries like Healthcare, BFSI and other sectors which want to keep their customers’ data private fall under this category.
Conclusion
These are some of the cloud migration strategies that organizations (specially Start-Ups) who are willing to migrate to the cloud should take into consideration. These strategies help organizations to accurately map on which applications they need to transfer to the cloud and which applications they need to keep on-premise. Having a clear understanding of existing infrastructure costs, which applications need to be migrated to the cloud and
projected savings in the future helps organizations to accurately calculate payback time and projected ROI.
