Over the past decade or so, cloud providers have steadily expanded their portfolio of offerings. This has complicated the process of migrating systems to the cloud. What was once a fairly straightforward matter of finding the right price for cloud storage or compute capacity has evolved into a more complex undertaking.
Many more choices exist for companies moving some of their computing environment to the cloud.
The basic advantages that first attracted customers to the cloud still exist. Organizations essentially rent capacity from cloud providers, eliminating the need for capital hardware expenditures. Using the vast resources that cloud vendors bring to the table, enterprises can easily scale up as their needs grow.
With the right agreement in place, they can also scale back if necessary to save money.
A wide array of cloud offerings has been developed as vendors seek to provide more value to their customers and create incentives to spur migration. In some cases, they support a simple “lift and shift” method of moving systems to the cloud intact. Many organizations have adopted a hybrid approach employing a mix of cloud and on-premises resources.
These solutions can offer a path toward modernizing the computing environment and extracting more value from enterprise data assets.
Migrating legacy systems intact is the quickest way to get them into the cloud. It’s usually just a matter of obtaining the cloud resources and moving some data to its new home. But multiple issues can impact the success of this type of migration strategy, including:
These issues need to be considered when planning how to best use an IT environment to achieve business goals. There may be better ways to address the needs of enterprise data consumers by modernizing systems and processes during migration.
One of the defining factors of modern business is its data-driven nature. Information resources are available from a dizzying array of diverse and incompatible data streams. Data consumers are everywhere from executive offices to the shipping department.
Addressing the specific needs of these very different groups of data consumers is one of the main challenges of integrating enterprise data resources.
Many legacy systems cannot, even with major enhancements, handle the current needs of enterprise data consumers. That implies they also will not be able to keep up with the evolution of new forms of information and innovative ways to use them.
The initial planning stage of a cloud migration should address these limitations head-on and search for ways to modernize the systems rather than simply shifting their location to the cloud.
Answering some questions about the systems under consideration for migration and their users can help determine if the process would benefit from a modernization effort.
Finding answers to these questions requires data awareness, which can be achieved through data models. The major components of data awareness include:
Once these questions are addressed, organizations can make informed decisions about migrating legacy systems or leveraging new cloud offerings to modernize IT environments and enhance business processes.
An IDERA Geek Sync Webcast presented by David Loshin offers an in-depth discussion on modernizing systems during cloud migration. Leveraging his extensive IT experience, David explores the distinctions between simple migration and system modernization.
The webcast concludes with a demonstration of ER/Studio Data Architect, emphasizing its capabilities as a powerful data modeling tool. This tool provides organizations with:
When migrating to the cloud, the easiest path might not lead to optimal outcomes. Consider the broader picture and evaluate whether it’s time to modernize systems while leveraging cloud resources effectively.
