If the buzz around cloud migration seems a bit deafening at the moment, it’s not your imagination. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will have completely eliminated the on-site data center due to moving workloads to hosted, colocation, and cloud solutions.
Making sure your enterprise keeps pace with the exodus to the cloud is critical on all sides of your business. You’ll want to be able to offer the latest innovations to your customers, but you’ll also need the capability to collaborate and communicate with providers and other business partners, all of which will be setting their sites on cloud migration.
Your enterprise IT management challenges may be similar to some of the larger, more complex infrastructures shifting to the cloud. Some have thousands of applications residing on various systems, with different lifecycles and management needs. You may also have unstructured or file-based data that makes scalability a challenge and legacy storage too costly.
You’ll need a way to streamline a cloud infrastructure that can increase accessibility to your files while controlling expenses and streamlining management. For some, it might make sense to implement a particular solution on a private cloud but retain the option to integrate systems into the public cloud in the future. Additionally, you may prefer to take advantage of some of the public cloud benefits (innovation, cost savings, etc) while placing some workloads in a private cloud solution to gain control and visibility into your infrastructure.
Decisions: Refactor or Migrate
One of the biggest decisions enterprises must make for each workload is whether to refactor or migrate (lift-and-shift). It can cost between $3 to 5 million for every application that must be rewritten for moving to the cloud and many enterprises don’t have the in-house talent or the resources to support a cloud-native application programming interface.
Data storage is another major hurdle. Most enterprises use a file-based storage system and moving the data to the cloud is a costly and time-consuming process. While shifting an application into the cloud may take only a few minutes, transitioning data to the cloud solutions can take weeks.
Before jumping into a cloud migration project, enterprises can simplify the overall process by doing an initial analysis to determine which applications can be refactored and which should be migrated. Each has its own advantages, such as the elasticity and ability to use microservices with refactoring. Migration tends to be faster but it can come with some sacrifices in areas like performance and requiring changes to workflows.
2025 will arrive before you know it, but with the right plans in place, you’ll be ready to face the future with your cloud migration already behind you. Contact us at eXemplify for more information about slating your applications for refactoring or migration.