Early in the cloud journey, CIOs focused on development projects and hosting native applications. Today, enterprises see the cloud as a destination for mission-critical workloads, which presents benefits and challenges. Most mission-critical applications weren’t born for the cloud or may not be cloud aware. Cost is also an issue as is finding services and partnerships that will address security and compliance concerns.
David Guzman, CIO of Staples Solutions, describes the IT challenge: “Improving the customer experience and leveraging advanced technologies for competitive advantage are mandating digital transformation. Advancing and funding digital transformation forces CIOs to free up human and financial resources by reducing the amount spent on implementing and maintaining in place critical systems. This makes the investment into the service model inherent in cloud technologies a no-brainer.” Migration, he says, is a distraction from digital business transformation.
In fact, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Virtustream, a Dell Technologies business, “Cloud Migration: Critical Drivers For Success,” found that organizations actually consider migration of critical applications to be complex, high risk, and expensive.
89% of early migrators experienced performance challenges with mission-critical applications.
Still, according to the study, based on a survey of 500 global IT decision makers with more than 500 employees, cloud computing strategies are widely adopted, and the migration of mission-critical apps continues to grow. On average, organizations actively engaged in the cloud have migrated 44% of their apps.
Cloud migration is distinctly harder than cloud adoption, according to the study. “Force fitting a ‘lift and shift’ approach to migrating some apps, particularly mission-critical ones, often results in firms choosing between cost and performance.”
Complexity is inherent, too. Nearly half (41%) of early migrators are challenged by costs related to refactoring applications for the cloud, while 89% experienced performance challenges with mission-critical applications.
To avoid this, Mike Evans, SVP of Customer Care and Cloud Operations for Virtustream, advises that IT should be explicit about expectations: “Take baseline measurements of long running jobs and analyze expected improvement. Benchmarking the application before the migration will ensure performance goals are not hampered by pre-existing conditions.”
Having a game plan for security is important, too, since these applications transact sensitive, private data and are targets for cyber threats. Nearly half (48%) of those surveyed say security was their most concerning challenge, and 42% said protecting personal information was a top security concern. Seeking out expert advice and choosing a hybrid cloud provider that understands compliance with industry and government regulations can help as well.
“Applications need to be available, provide performance, and offer a secure environment for critical business operations,” says Evans. “When done right, the payoff for the enterprise is operational efficiency, business agility, and greater competitive advantage.”
