In today’s world, it is a goal for every organization to keep their on-premises system at an efficient cost, up to date. And when migrating any workload to a new environment, whether it be another datacenter, or to a public cloud, your IT team should have a clear set of goals for migration in mind.

Note that both technology-focused and business-focused goals motivate potential migrations, but any such effort should result in indirect benefits to the organization’s business.

Some example goals that cause workload owners to consider migrations include:

• Addressing the hardware obsolescence cycle. Networking, storage, and computer hardware typically has a 3-5 year lifespan. After that time, the hardware becomes increasingly expensive to maintain. When new hardware is ordered, and software migrated, the cycle starts again. Many organizations want a way out of this expensive planned obsolescence cycle.
• Moving away from the ‘pre-purchase capacity’ model. When purchasing hardware, organizations must pre-purchase enough capacity to grow into over a 3 to 5-year period. Organizations desire the ability to pay only for the capacity required at that moment, and to be able to scale workloads up, down, in, and out as demand dictates.
• Lack of IT agility. A perceived slowness in IT responding to business needs can translate into missed opportunities. Organizations want to have IT respond quickly with robust, modern solutions when a business opportunity presents itself.
• Desire to re-focus on core competencies. Organizations whose core purpose is not related to managing complex data center deployments may eventually want to shed competing interests and focus on improving their core business.
• Expense of maintaining a global presence. Organizations that have customers all over the world want to serve that distributed user base well. But maintaining datacenter deployments in many, geographically dispersed locations, is complex and expensive.
• Enable disaster-recovery scenarios. Business continuity and disaster recovery are critical concerns that keep business leaders up at night. But enabling these scenarios has typically been prohibitively expensive and extremely complex.

When planning for migration of workloads to Cloud, consider three phases: Discover, Migrate and Optimize.

Discover. In the Discover phase, you work to get better visibility of applications, workloads, and data in your environment, and assess the optimal resource level to run them in Cloud. Use this information to help decide which workloads to move. Cloud Migrate is the primary tool for this and includes:

• Automated server, app, and database discovery.
• Intelligent workload right-sizing and costing for maximum ROI.
• Workload configuration analyses and recommendations.

Migrate. In the Migrate phase, you move selected workloads to Cloud. There are a variety of sources including physical servers and virtualized workloads hosted in Hyper-V or VMware environments. Cloud Site Recovery is the primary tool in this area and includes:

• Lifting and shifting of servers, apps, databases, and data.
• Containerization of existing applications and infrastructure.
• Modernization options for apps and databases.

Optimize. In the Optimize phase, you fine-tune your Cloud-based workloads and maximize your ROI. There are many Cloud partners to help you with backup, monitoring, security assessments, and cost management and you can consider INET for those services.

In conclusion, the Cloud Migration service assesses on-premises workloads for migration, and the service examines the migration suitability of on-premises machines, performance-based sizing, and provides cost estimations for running your on-premises machines in Cloud. If you’re contemplating lift-and-shift migrations, or are in the early assessment stages of migration, this service is for you.

If you would like to host or migrate your business data onto the cloud, consider I-Net Dynamics’ expertise as a Microsoft Gold partner and many years of experience in assisting countless customers in getting their business application and data on the cloud. Contact us here today!