According to the latest stats from Forrester Research, the global cloud market is set to grow 30% to $120 billion in 2021.
There is no longer any mystery behind why this worldwide movement from on-premise IT implementations to cloud-based IT deployments is taking place.
After all, the cloud took center stage for many enterprises that found themselves needing to rapidly address business continuity issues during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Aside from this obvious catalyst, the business world is becoming more aware of the benefits that the cloud provides, including:
- IT cost reduction
- increased agility
- access to new tools and services -
All this is vital to organizations that are increasingly reliant on information technology to operate and compete in today's global marketplace.
While more businesses are becoming aware of the benefits of adopting cloud, many are still caught short when it comes to understanding the complexity of actually building a plan to migrate their infrastructure to the cloud.
A typical migration plan involves the consideration of over 150 specific metrics as well as millions of possible cloud configurations, all whilst under the pressure to best support an organization's business requirements and deliver maximum ROI.
Understanding Cloud Migration Complexity
Navigating months - even years - of assessment and planning work before a single critical workload touches the cloud is typical of an enterprise-level cloud migration initiative.
This may be hard to believe.
But let's take the single task of evaluating cloud vendor options as an example.
If you combine all instance types, storage options, availability zones, and pricing plans from the major cloud vendors, there are currently more than 25 million available cloud configurations.
Given this staggering reality, choosing the optimal configuration for your organization suddenly becomes much more challenging.
And as if that's not daunting enough, the available configurations - and your requirements at any given time - are constantly evolving.
Unfortunately, these moving targets create a complexity that makes it difficult for companies to experience the performance and cost benefits they're capable of in the timeframe they want (if at all).
Precision vs The Need For Speed
When it comes to planning cloud migration, precision equals performance.
After all, mistakes during cloud migration planning can lead to overspending, waste and inefficiencies that threaten the value provided by your cloud as well as your ability to scale up adoption in the future.
Having said that, migration momentum must always be top of mind.
If your planning and assessment workstreams take too long to conclude, you risk extending the time-to-value of your cloud initiative and losing support and sponsorship from business stakeholders.
Planning a cloud migration requires a delicate balance of speed and precision.
The only way to accurately and efficiently match your needs to the most suitable cloud configuration and feel confident that you are realizing the full potential of the cloud is to adopt a deep analytical approach.
Smart Migrations
This deeply analytical approach is what drives a smart cloud migration methodology.
Software-enabled automation will rapidly assess your estate and provide a total cost of ownership overview, helping you build a rock-solid business case for migration.
We then leverage data from hundreds of successful enterprise cloud migrations and use pattern analysis to rapidly build a comprehensive, low-risk cloud migration plan.
This software-enabled automation, combined with expertise, helps condense the often painful process of outlining your cloud configuration from months (or even years) to a matter of weeks - thus, significantly accelerating the time-to-value of cloud adoption.
The real beauty of this approach is that it provides faster, more accurate outcomes in a more cost-efficient way by requiring less labor-intensive processes. Learn More!
