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A beginners guide to cloud migration
2021-01-28 19:37:23| The Webmail Blog
A beginners guide to cloud migration nellmarie.colman Thu, 01/28/2021 - 12:37 Unless your business was born in the cloud, you likely rely on some IT applications or legacy infrastructure that you own, host or manage yourself. These systems may have fueled your growth in the past, but as you move toward newer technologies such as AI, machine learning and automation your legacy, non-cloud-based systems can hold you back. They simply arent built to take advantage of cloud native technologies. In this article, well work to set you on the right path to migrating your workloads, applications and processes to the cloud. Youll learn the basics about moving workloads to the cloud as well as how to still get value out of your legacy investments. Well also show you how to get help when you need it. In the end, youll be one step closer to transforming your business. What is cloud migration? A cloud migration is the process of moving digital assets including workloads, data and applications to a public or private cloud environment. It also involves decisions around how you plan to use, maintain, optimize and govern your cloud once the digital migration is complete. What are the benefits of cloud migration? The specific benefits of a cloud migration are closely tied to the benefits of the platform you choose. For example, if you migrate to a managed private cloud platform, youll experience substantial security and performance gains. And if you migrate to a public cloud platform, your benefits will center more around microservices and flexibility. But regardless of which platform you choose, moving from an on-premises environment to a hosted one will generally result in: Cost efficiency By moving away from expensive, legacy infrastructure, you can realize instant savings on IT operations, as you move from a capex to an opex model. This lets you hold on to more cash or reinvest your capex budgets into business-critical initiatives. Productivity improvements In the cloud, your IT can be freed of its operational burdens and turn its expertise toward building whats next. For end-users, the cloud provides enhanced functionality allowing them to do their jobs faster and more efficiently. Innovation enhancements Modernized cloud infrastructure gives your IT team greater agility so that they can deliver new functionality to users faster. Leveraging the cloud also allows them to implement cutting-edge technology like AI, IoT and machine learning to drive innovation. Attempting to execute such resource-intensive technologies on legacy hardware is not only expensive but, in some cases, impossible. Assessing your applications before migrating The first step in a cloud migration is workload selection. If your project is too large, youll likely face scope creep and long timeframes so start with a small, impactful workload and move on to increasingly complex workloads later, after youve gained some cloud migration experience. Use application profiling to gather and organize information about your workloads and applications. Follow these steps to assess and prioritize workloads for cloud migration: Audit your existing environments metrics around compute needs, performance output, response times and other factors important to business operations. This will help you establish a baseline and develop KPIs for the incoming platform. Itemize and collect key information about your workloads, such as physical and virtual server configurations, network topology, compliance requirements, data and application dependencies, geographic considerations and user needs. This will help you set requirements for selecting the right cloud platform to support your environment. Based on the audit and information gathering, categorize your workloads in order of migration complexity. Identify which workloads can be easily migrated without the need to replatform or refactor. Prioritize these easy-to-migrate workloads for cloud migration. What is the right cloud deployment model? Once youve identified your candidate workloads, align their requirements with their best-fit cloud platform. Though we refer to the cloud as a singular entity, there are multiple cloud types to consider. This is why assessing your applications and workloads is so critical. That effort will help you make informed cloud platform choices based on what you need and what the platform can provide. Public cloud. In a public cloud, infrastructure is shared by multiple businesses and owned and operated by a service provider. Because it allows you to easily scale resources up and down to meet demand and pay-as-you-go, its a great option for managing unpredictable traffic and maximizing cost savings. Private cloud. In a private cloud, infrastructure is dedicated entirely to your business. This gives you the ability to customize your compute, storage and networking and, as a result, achieve greater levels of control and security. Depending on your workload requirements and resource utilization, private cloud may also result in more cost savings than public cloud infrastructure. Hybrid cloud. Some workloads require a hybrid cloud that connects both public and private cloud environments. A hybrid cloud can give you the control of the private cloud for your sensitive, business-critical assets, plus the flexibility and cost savings of the public cloud for your public-facing operations. Multicloud. Basically, multicloud means what it sounds like: multiple clouds. From your on-premises data center and private clouds to hyperscale clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), cloud-based SaaS applications and even colocation environments it all comes together to create your unique multicloud. And the lines are starting to blur a bit between some of these definitions. With solutions like AWS Outposts, now you can bring a public hyperscale cloud into your own data center, on dedicated hardware. And you can run a private VMware Cloud on AWS. This just means you have more options to choose from, as you look for the right platform for your cloud migration. Choosing your cloud migration strategy After youve decided which workloads belong on which clouds, you need to select the best path for transitioning from here to there. An organization will likely use multiple migration strategies across workloads as there is no one-size-fits-all approach. For example, an organizations monolithic ERP system may use a lift-and-shift strategy for technical or licensing reasons, while an HR system is completely replaced by a SaaS option. There are six common cloud migration strategies for making the move: 1. Replace In this approach, you completely decommission and replace your existing legacy components with a cloud-based alternative. This creates a fast route to the cloud, but it requires a
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cloud
migration
beginners
Walkthrough & Overview Guide
2021-01-08 17:22:56| PortlandOnline
Tags: guide
overview
walkthrough
Elon Musk's guide to getting ahead in business
2021-01-07 01:12:45| BBC News | Business | UK Edition
Six principles that have helped Elon Musk become one of the richest people on the planet.
Tags: business
guide
ahead
elon
A brief guide to legacy system modernization
2020-12-07 23:04:08| The Webmail Blog
A brief guide to legacy system modernization nellmarie.colman Mon, 12/07/2020 - 16:04 As we enter a new era of AI advances and data-driven business models, businesses are taking a fresh look at their technology systems. Instead of seeing IT as a cost required to run their business, theyre recognizing that technology can be an asset that grows their business. Your legacy systems may have fueled your growth in the past, but theyre reaching a maturity point. As you embark on new paths and strategies such as social, mobile, analytics and cloud strategies like AI and IoT youll likely end up, like most businesses, ignoring your old systems. But dont linger in this stall or dilemma zone. Its time to unlock the data and intelligence held in your legacy systems and include them in your digital transformation journey. In this guide, well discuss how to make this happen so you can position yourself to meet customer demands and business challenges and redefine your business. What is a legacy system? A legacy system refers to outdated infrastructure, applications and processes. Typically housed in monolithic and tightly coupled environments, legacy systems generally run on software and hardware that is customer-owned, hosted, managed and supported. Although these systems are functional, they can create a financial burden to maintain, require difficult-to-find IT skills to operate and hinder your ability to innovate. What is legacy modernization? Legacy modernization is the process of updating and optimizing business systems to gain operational efficiencies, address technology constraints, meet customer experience expectations and support adoption and integration with other systems based on newer technology platforms. The process of legacy modernization is initiated when organizations find themselves stuck between maintaining older, expensive hardware that is unable to interoperate with new technologies, and undertaking the monumental task of revamping infrastructure to take advantage of a best-fit platform to support its business goals. This leads CIOs and IT leaders to balance a variety of factors to determine the time to modernization, where modernization delivers the most impact and how to properly plan the project to reduce business disruptions. The minimum goal of legacy system modernization is to achieve a like-to-like system parity with operational enhancements. The ideal goal is to achieve significant leaps in performance, agility and innovation. Legacy modernization can range widely on the spectrum. One option may be to refactor code using migration tools to run the same system with minimal code changes on more modern infrastructure. In some cases, emulators are available that let you avoid code changes altogether. On the other end is completely re-architecting the system, replacing the legacy system with one built using cloud native development tools. Legacy system modernization strategies Most legacy modernization projects can take either a revolutionary or evolutionary approach. Revolutionary modernization Revolutionary modernization refers to a complete, from-the-ground-up infrastructure transformation. For example, mergers and acquisitions frequently require this approach when one business must quickly adapt to the infrastructure of the new entity. Another common application of a revolutionary approach is where the legacy system has gone beyond being a burden and has become a risk. A common problem is when legacy systems are no longer supported by their vendors, which leaves organizations with security or compliance holes, and no new patches or updates. This approach presents risk, disruption and higher costs. Evolutionary modernization More risk-averse organizations usually choose the evolutionary method. The evolutionary modernization approach is a multi-phased, long-term model to achieve the same goals as the revolutionary approach. With the evolutionary approach, organizations take a workload-by-workload path to modernization, modernizing one workload at a time. This slower approach reduces business disruptions and spreads costs over time. Organizations locked into vendor contracts might take this approach to modernize around the legacy system while waiting for contracts to expire. Also, hybrid models allow organizations to connect cloud resources to on-premises environments to support evolutionary legacy transformation. Six considerations for choosing a legacy modernization approach To decide between adopting an evolutionary or a revolutionary approach, you should start with a thorough evaluation of your operations to determine the best path forward. The evaluation process should include assessing the following considerations: 1. Workload Audit applications and software to determine their business value, criticality and where there are opportunities to modernize. Assess workloads holistically in context of the go-forward business direction. 2. Architecture Review infrastructure elements, performance and ROI to assess where newer technologies can deliver better outcomes. 3. Financial Evaluate spend to find budget burdens and ways to optimize resources to support current operations and prepare for whats next. 4. Risk Weigh the possible disruption to the business, as well as any associated impacts to business processes and organizational culture against the desired outcomes of your legacy system modernization project. Also consider the risk of keeping the legacy system as-is, including maintenance for out-of-support systems or those with limited resource support staff. 5. Operations Determine which new skill sets, training and processes need to be factored into modernization costs and timelines. 6. Security Plan ways to protect systems before, during and after modernization to avoid data loss, outages or exposure. In the security plan, organizations should confirm adherence to governmental and industry compliance regulations in the new environment. The benefits of legacy system modernization Modernization offers the following payoffs: Operational efficiency: Modernized IT systems deliver better performance, faster time-to-market and better experiences for internal and external customers. Reduced costs: Decommissioning monolithic apps, data center space and physical servers reduces software, hardware and licensing costs. IT agility: With modernized systems, you can tune your environment to react faster to seasonal fluctuations, leverage data across the organization, integrate systems to optimize processes, adapt to business conditions or quickly jump on the next innovation opportunity to beat your competitors to the marketplace. Why do you need a legacy system update? Factors that driv
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guide
legacy
modernization
Biodiversity Benchmark tool to guide raw material choices
2020-12-03 12:55:00| Daily apparel & textile news and comment - from just-style.com
A new Biodiversity Benchmark tool has launched to help the fashion and textile industry understand - and improve - the impacts its raw material choices have on nature.
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