After years of hearing about the benefits of the cloud, you’re probably reading this today because the big day has come. Your organization has decided to jump in to this cloud world with both feet. You’re packing your bags and are ready to migrate to the cloud. First, I’m going to give you the bad news, but don’t worry. I will share with you the one strategy that will allow you to have a successful migration. So, the bad news is that easy cloud migrations exists the same way easy marriages do, only in our dreams. The good news is that successful cloud migrations exists the same way successful marriages do, through a simple commitment and a lot of hard work. Before you get discouraged, let me tell you something. You probably are taking advantage of the cloud already.

It’s actually surprising how many companies leverage the cloud today. Just type into your favorite search engine a simple question, “Do companies leverage the cloud?”. You will get a big surprise. It seems almost everyone uses some service in the cloud. The Covid-19 pandemic had a lot to do with that. Some common services used are DAAS (Desktop as a Service), things like VDI for example, and SAAS (Software as a Service), things like Email, Office365, virtual conferencing, and Salesforce. These allow you to work from anywhere and provide a level of reliability few organizations have the money to implement in their own data centers. The more surprising thing is how many organizations think they don’t leverage the cloud, but want to.

A big reason for that thinking is that the most visible and costly things have not been migrated to the cloud and still live in your data center. Legacy storage and network drives are one. Data and compute processes, like month end cycles for example, are another. Those are also the exact things cloud vendors want you to move to their data center or take advantage of in their tools to do. They want you to do so for many of the same reasons you haven’t done so yet. Complex integrations and dependencies, traditional data processing and storage are just a difficult and time consuming thing to change. A poor implementation of data retention policies adds to ever growing file shares and databases. A lack of documentation adds to the pain of unwinding the complexity. Poor coding practices and a lack of integration architecture make the processing costly. The heap of garbage in many organizations feels like too much to take on.

Cloud vendors know this better then anyone. Just think about how many vendors don’t charge for ingress of data but have some hefty costs for pulling that data out. They know that once you get your data on their hardware in the cloud, you are very unlikely to move it out. They throw some egress costs on there and you are now stuck. This led to a lot of early adopters of the cloud to select just one cloud vendor since it’s not an egress cost if you move data in their cloud. Ironically, that takes away the greatest benefit of being in the cloud, the flexibility and innovation that comes with new tools and applications that spring up almost by the minute. It also limits your negotiation power with the vendor. It’s no different then having an on-premise data center you can’t move anywhere. Multi-cloud strategies are now much more common but require planning and sometimes special tools to ensure costs are under control. Remember, despite what you hear, there is nothing free in the cloud.

So what is this commitment that needs to be made in an organization to successfully migrate to and navigate the cloud world? It’s really simple, like a marriage vow between the parties in the enterprise, “We promise and commit to change the way we work, accept change as an opportunity, and expect change in all that we do”. That’s it. It’s really that simple. To successfully migrate to and navigate the cloud together, you have to embrace change. If you don’t commit to change, you’ll end up right where you started. The only difference is it will be in someone else’s data center.

Now that you’re ready, there are names and marketing campaigns for all kinds of cloud strategies; but, really there are two core thoughts. Do you rewrite something for the cloud or do you build new?

The safe strategy is to build new. You can architecture data flows and applications to leverage the best tools and designs to allow for growth and future change. Documentation can make future improvements and changes easier. You can implement retention and security practices you dream about implementing in the current environment. It also fits right into your new commitment to change.

The rewrite option can be tricky but sometimes necessary. Some portion of what you currently do works well. It helped you make the money to pay for this cloud migration. Those things will still have to change to work efficiently in the cloud. Data has to move differently in the cloud. You will most likely need to find new tools to meet your needs. Rewriting existing processes to work on new tools the same way is not always the easiest or best use of resources. Many times existing processes can’t scale with your growth, and since you did commit to change, you probably have a backlog of requests to do things differently and would want to include those in the rewrite. Those can be tricky to test and integrate. Finally, you need to be selective in what you take with you on your new adventure in the cloud. Many legacy applications and reporting processes are ghosts forever in your environment without any use cases. The same is said of your files and data. You will want to leave some behind based on that fancy new retention policy, finally making your legal department happy and helping keep costs down.

Before the experts burn me at the stake, there is a third path out there. Lift and shift your environment to the cloud. That isn’t really a strategy but a result of one of two things, either your existing data center is about to blow up or you have money to burn. Very little of what companies do in their own data center will work well in cloud infrastructure without a heavy financial cost.

I’m confident this simple commitment to change with a lot of hard work will allow your cloud migration to succeed. You may need help with the analysis and planning. There are plenty of consulting companies out there great at doing just that. Finally, I’ll leave you with this. Trying new things and making changes can be rewarding, but making changes and running projects without the why is a recipe for disaster. An organization that embraces change must always understand the why and make it easy to communicate the why to all involved. Next time, I will provide a simple enterprise solution to managing the why of every change your organization wants to make.