Measure twice; cut once. This is the mantra of master builders who double check measurements before cutting materials to avoid mistakes, waste and unnecessary costs.

In cloud migration, the same principle applies – on steroids!

To maximize value from cloud investment, you need to understand what you’re building by asking the right questions about vision and strategy. Then it’s time to measure by gathering qualitative and quantitative data to assess current and future states before migration.

Doing this preparatory work will not only ensure a data center moves to the cloud as quickly and efficiently as possible – it will also reduce the cost and increase the value of your new technology estate in the cloud.

1. Get it right first time with planning and preparation
   In cloud terms, ‘measuring before you cut’ involves a:

   
   
   • Qualitative assessment of business strategy and outcomes – What are you trying to achieve? What is the vision? Where do you strategically want to be? Your organization may need to be more agile, more cost efficient, more process efficient, more secure, or more capable of innovation. Take the time to workshop your immediate goals and your long-term vision so your cloud provisioning supports them.
   
   
   • Quantitative assessment of cloud readiness – How many applications will migrate over easily? How many need to be remediated? How many need to be completely rearchitected? Finding this out used to be a painful and time-consuming process. Today, we can automatically detect and remediate incompatibilities.

Armed with a vision and backed up by data, you can make decisions by blending the technology view with your business objectives. In many cases, we find the current data center is no longer aligned with a client’s strategy. Strategy changes regularly. Data centers not so much. Years of drift have led to redundant apps and data sources that aren’t used any more – and have no clear ownership.

If the current environment is not fit for purpose, replicating it in the cloud is a great way to migrate all your problems without gaining any benefits. To get to value, plan a new and improved technology estate that will support your goals and future-proof your business.

2. Use auto-remediation to fast-track lift and shift
   Until recently, large organizations with complex legacy systems were taking months or even years to fix data incompatibilities and migrate their apps to a cloud environment. Today, we can cut through this work at high speed. Auto-remediation tools take very large datasets and execute scripts to rapidly get apps into a ready state for migration. Within a month, your organization could be ready to move over to the cloud environment.

   
   

   By dramatically speeding up the process, auto-remediation de-risks migration and drastically reduces costs. With little human effort and alleviating the need to pay for two separate environments at the same time, the result is an accelerated path to leveraging data, releasing software updates more frequently and easily and scaling with demand.

3. Create the best landing zone for your modern cloud estate
   Migrating to the cloud offers you an opportunity to modernize, or even reimagine, your operating model. The idea is to create tailored landing zones: specially designed cloud environments aligned to your needs in the cloud, provisioned and prepared to take all your data and applications, and host your workloads.

   
   

   To do so requires a clear understanding of the new technology environment you want to enable. We’re back to ‘measure twice, cut once’. It’s worth spending time fine-tuning what’s needed in the cloud – and what isn’t!

Our clients find enhanced value comes from:

• Right sizing. Make sure you provision for all that you need – but not more than you need. The size of your target environment depends on the memory, compute power and storage in use and what licenses or support you need. It’s instructive to look at the cost of different pricing models on your current technology estate. This will help you get maximum value from your spend, avoiding wasting money on things you don’t need while building the platform for future growth.

• Server sizing. Getting this right will help you to reduce both energy consumption and emissions. We can help you visualize all servers on premise, or in a multi-cloud set-up, mapping complex hybrid estates to find the best placement for each workload. This also provides transparency of emissions, supporting carbon reporting.

Many organizations know they want to get to the cloud, but don’t have a clear understanding of why or what they want to enable. Their big question is: What’s the most efficient way to get there? According to MIT CISR, of which Avanade is a patron, speed to value is greatest for organizations that adopt a coordinated, metrics-driven, domain-based approach.

If you’re one of the majority of organizations with what MIT calls the ‘silos and spaghetti’ of legacy technologies, making incremental changes is laborious and slow. Whereas, taking a highly industrialized approach based on setting a vision, gathering data on current and future states, using auto-remediation and building the right landing zone will get you to your desired future state at pace and scale.

Need to accelerate your cloud journey but unsure how to drive business value? Register for a personalized workshop and we can help you to rethink your cloud strategy and create a roadmap for your journey.