Impact of Covid-19: Cloud Migration Is Evolving as an Essential Strategy?

The worldwide unprecedented disruptions caused by COVID 19 pandemic has strengthened the importance of being an agile business than ever. Enterprises have started accepting this “new normal” to make their Business Continuity Plan comprehensive. Organizations have started revisiting/rethinking their VMG (Vision, Mission, and Goal) strategy including IT strategies to strive in this pandemic situation to compete in today’s marketplace.

Quick adoption of cloud computing technology can help organizations to combat the challenges which are getting emerged due to pandemic situation and propel into a highly competitive business landscape. There are no doubt enterprises can achieve cost-benefit, flexibility, accessibility, agility, scalability, elasticity with cloud adoption, but it should not be looked only as a technical modernization program. The pandemic is pushing organizations hard to look at cloud migration jobs from a tactical lens along with a strategic lens.

Application Modernization and Cloud Migration should be a systematic and phased approach. In this cloud era, adoption for a multi-cloud environment has also started to gain momentum to address specific business requirements which is a mix of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud services from different Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).

According to various surveys and reports:

It is expected that the “Cloud Migration” services market will grow at a CAGR of ~24% and has the potential to grow by USD 7.1 billion during the next 4 years. Overall “Cloud Market” size is expected to grow at a CAGR of ~12.5% and to reach USD 295 billion marks by 2021.

Why organizations are thinking of accelerating Cloud journey amid COVID-19 pandemic?

• The domino effect of the lockdown imposed by the Government due to the COVID 19 pandemic has pushed companies hard for seamless remote work and better collaboration.
• Organizations are facing tremendous challenges in continuing their business operations and access their very critical legacy applications.
• Due to the unavailability of resources/Govt. policies, maintaining own datacenter (DC) is getting the costly and tedious task.
• Many organizations are getting hammered to maintain uptime for many applications. Due to unprecedented traffics performance is also getting compromised.
• Many health care organizations are not capable of handling a sudden spike in the demand for various service operations.
• Organizations are looking for opportunities on how to achieve operational efficiencies and reduce TCO to offset their losses due to pandemic.

As Pandemic Comes In, On-Premises Goes Out? Let’s discuss some key considerations which can probably provide an answer to this question.

What are all considerations for the Cloud Migration journey?

Below are a few high-level considerations which can’t be overlooked while organizations deciding for quick movement to cloud:

1. What is the objective behind the cloud movement?
   • Define business justifications
   • Document business outcomes
2.  Find the right partner for cloud migration
   • Evaluate partners experience, capabilities and partnerships with various cloud providers
   • Evaluate the cultural fitness of the partner
3. Which cloud service provider we should opt for?
   • Perform cost performance analysis among tops CSPs like AWS, Azure and GCP
   • Perform comparison analysis from business need aspect and security standpoint
4. Which applications to target first for migration and which one to keep on-premise?
   • Perform thorough application portfolio assessment to find various treatment options (Re-Host, Re-Platform, Re-Factor, Re-Build, Retain, Remove) for your applications
   • Keep CMDB updated, segregate low hanging fruits and business-critical applications
   • Prepare a detailed roadmap
5. What organizational changes do we foresee post-migration?
   • Accept it as a cultural change rather than just technical modernization
   • Determine how roles, policies, ways of working will need to change
   • Support from top management and coordination across various disciplines
6. Be aware of common cloud migration pitfalls
   • Clean-Bowled: Have your overall strategy in place and estimate migration time and cost in the 1^st phase  
   • Getting into marathon race: Prepare applications to move groups and determine which applications to move in initial phases of migration
   • Integration Mishap: Understand application Integration issues and vendor dependencies

What Various Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) Have Done So Far?

Let’s talk about the top three players in the cloud market: AWS, Azure and GCP.

They have started conducting more frequent disaster recovery (DR) testing led by professional site reliability engineers (SREs) to evaluate the resilience of their processes and infra. They are keeping technical engineers(dedicated) to make sure all services are running even when there are sudden spikes in traffic or any unforeseen events for high traffic industries. Also, they have provisioned support agents to cater to the need for new ways of working i.e. remote access.

Google has announced to make advanced features in Google Meet free to all G Suite and G Suite for global Education customers. Also providing training opportunities to upskill employees. Google cloud has acquired Cornerstone technology to help clients for mainframe application migration.

AWS commits $20 million on AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative to accelerate RandD, diagnostics, and testing of COVID 19. Thus, helping private entities and research institutes who are using AWS for the development of diagnostics services. It has also revamped its supply chain to ensure the availability of storage and compute resources. Also, increased infra testing cycles.

Microsoft is making Teams available for everyone. Microsoft Azure is partnering with governments to ensure datacenters have on-site staffing and all functions are running properly and prioritizing the special needs of government agencies and first responder companies. They have started stress testing of their systems to ensure breathing room for their customers in terms of workloads.

Conclusion

There is an obvious need for organizations to tailor their strategy to make it in line with the current change. During this tempestuous time, there are two options: one to wait for the situation to come to normal or to react first. Organizations can think of this change as an opportunity to uplift their overall IT strategy to achieve business goals and stay afloat.

Cloud is no more an alien terminology for anyone, we have seen many industries have started gaining quick revenue and agility with cloud adaptation. It’s high time for enterprises to explore and strive towards unleashing the true potential of cloud computing with a holistic approach.

Happy Reading!!