The 7 Must Do's of Shifting Workloads to the Cloud

You’ve made the decision to move to the cloud for a number of reasons including operational efficiencies, greater flexibility, cost savings. Now comes the hard part….shifting your workloads to the cloud.

There are many obstacles organisations can encounter during this transition. It’s important to know what these obstacles are, when they might appear and most importantly how to stop them from causing disastrous impacts to your cloud migration.

Alastair Ballantyne, Manager at Wavestone, has vast experience in helping clients shifting workloads to public and private cloud. Hear his experience, thoughts and opinions on this topic.

Definition: "Shifting Workloads"

“A workload is considered any underlying system which supports a business process. Shifting Workloads is the act of transforming the workload from one state to another e.g. data centre to cloud or desktop to VDI.”

What are the key drivers for businesses shifting their workloads?

There are countless reasons why businesses want to shift their workloads and it varies from business to business. The reoccurring reasons we see from our clients are:

To reduce the cost of legacy applications and infrastructure by modernising the estate through virtualisation, moving to the cloud or migrating workloads to a consumption-based cost model.
To leverage the speed and agility provided by the cloud and reduce the time to develop and upgrade applications and services using DevOps.
To address CIO’s digital agenda through consolidating and reducing costs and services.
As a result of political or regulatory change (e.g. Brexit or GDPR) requiring migration to a different geography.

How should businesses prepare? The 7 must do's...

1. A clear, adopted and supported Technology strategy

Major technology transformations are often reactive and are undertaken because there is a specific need to change something, whether it’s compliance, building moves, technical obsolescence or risk assessments to name a few. To ensure that the right solution is selected it is important to understand the current and future needs of the business and as a result the supporting technology model.

A well thought out technology and cloud strategy will remove emotion and external factors from the decision-making process and enable procurement plans to be put in place for the future. Decisions must not be aspirational, but truly tied to how the organisation operates today and how it will evolve tomorrow.

There must be complete buy from the business to ensure that the planned transformation will meet the needs of the business. Only then will there be true support for the programme of shifting workloads.

2. A detailed business case and justification

Using an approved technology strategy as the spring-board, a detailed business case must be written to ensure that all available options have been evaluated for suitability for the business. The business case should always be strategically aligned to how the whole company plans to adapt to future change.

The business case must ensure that realistic timeframes and budget are in place for the project to run without unnecessarily increasing operational risk to the business. It’s also important to have a clear understanding of any pre-requisite activities that need to be undertaken before a large transformation programme can be commenced. These must be factored into the technology strategy and the business case.

3. A separation of transformation and migration activities

For the greatest chance of success, it is always advised to reduce the complexity and risk associated with large technology changes. Trying to make fundamental changes to applications and services at the same time as shifting workloads from one technology to another often results in breached budgets, overrun timescales and business outages.

4. Robust Processes and Controls

Large workload transformations put significant strain on existing processes and controls. Before you undertake a shift of your workloads, ensure that the change management, technology and security controls are in place to facilitate the volume of change being undertaken.

Consider what organisational changes may be required to support the Target Operating Model post migration. Moving to the cloud can sound great, but to maximise the time and financial savings, you must be able to cross charge costs, automate service requests and manage multiple providers seamlessly.

5. Detailed and up to date CMDB linking infrastructure to business processes

To plan a migration effectively, you must understand the implications of making changes to any item across the technology service stack. An automated and integrated CMDB mapped top-down from business process technology infrastructure will accelerate the discovery process and de-risk the migration through clear knowledge and traceability.

6. Clear ownership and escalation channels

Often overlooked and linked to adoption of a technology strategy is the ability to solve issues quickly and escalate key decisions to be made. This is critical to ensuring a project meets its stated outcomes.

Clear ownership and governance across the programme will ensure that not only correct decisions are made, but that the right people are held to account for these decisions. Enforcement of this governance structure must be delivered throughout the organisation from the CEO down.

7. Find the right balance between shifting timescales and risk appetite

Balancing the demands of technology teams with the risk appetite of the business is a key area that often gets overlooked. The business is often risk adverse as they do not want to impact the day-to-day operation of the organisation. Conversely, the technology teams often want to migrate quickly as they already understand the technical capabilities and likelihood of failure. Taking the business on the journey and ensuring that their concerns are being addressed while demonstrating the approach and testing is robust is key for delivering a project with well managed risk.

Obstacles and Challenges: What to look out for...

Ensure the right programme team is in place to minimise risk.

Large-scale and complex transformational change is not a frequent occurrence. Most organisations will only do this once in 10 years. Ensuring that you have the right people to support you in undertaking change is imperative to allow the technical teams to focus on design and support, the programme team to plan, drive and deliver and the central governance to be able to understand and make clear informed decisions. Programmes where large workloads are moved from one technology to another put a large strain on existing teams. Business as usual teams are often already running at capacity and unable to focus all their attention on a large programme – resulting in error. From our experience, ensuring that the right programme team is in place to minimise risk is a key concern for many our clients.

Maintaining business continuity throughout the lifecycle of change without major impact to service is a constant worry and a regulatory obligation. The ability to protect the business and de-risk activity is critical to the success of a programme and to make sure that the entire organisation is bought into the change.

Obstacles and Challenges: How to overcome these...

Understanding the existing experience in your team and aligning them to the project is key to success. Many successful programmes acquire knowledgeable temporary staff to support the change portfolio, but many have also failed as they lack the experience of working on this type of programme day-in, day-out. Making sure that you select the right experts with strong leadership and stakeholder management along with a clear track record of delivering similar projects will ensure that the chances of success can be maximised.

When putting together the technology change business case, you must consider the existing organisation capacity to support change. With support, it is often preferential to have existing technical teams involved in large change as they understand the estate clearly. If these resources have to be called away to perform incident management or support other projects, then large change programmes can be quickly delayed or risk increased. It is always recommended to have a clear understanding of the existing capacity and skills of the team and ensure that any resources brought into support them have the skills, attitude and drive to make the programme a success.

By minimising the amount of change happening and truly understanding how your technology supports revenue generation, you can significantly de-risk large transformational change. Managing the discovery and communication closely and also factoring in existing change and business events allows planned migration events to be accepted first time and provide confidence in the programme team that you understand their business needs.

A final piece of advice…

Do not underestimate the amount of discovery, remediation and planning time required for a migration.
Take time to analyse and scope the estate and ensure that information is readily available and can be updated automatically.
Plan process, procedure and organisational change in parallel and treat the whole technology transformation strategy as a large programme with clear cross dependencies.
Finally, ensure that the projects and programme decisions are always aligned to the technology strategy, otherwise short-term fixes become long term problems.