eBooks
Helpful guides from D3V & Google Cloud.
Your Journey to [Google] Cloud
Your Journey to [Google] Cloud
Maintaining the right balance between speed, deadlines, and cost can be difficult during cloud migrations, especially if a comprehensive map isn’t established early on.
That said, by following four logical steps and understanding the key aspects of cloud adoption, businesses become far more likely to achieve an on-time and cost-effective cloud migration.
About This eBook
About This eBook
As the cloud is becoming an integral part of core business operations all around the world, the pressure to successfully migrate to the cloud without hiccups is increasing. However, approximately half of all application migration projects go over budget and past the deadline. But at the same time, the other half don’t. What this tells us is that there are steps that ensuring a successful and cost-effective cloud migration isn’t natural but rather requires a series of proactive measures.
And the good news is that all of these steps are well established, tested, and there are dozens of resources that help businesses create their journey to the cloud, around these steps - this eBook is one such resource.
Key Takeaways:
- Take your time when choosing your first-mover workload/application
- Leverage proven best practices throughout the cloud migration
- Partner with a Google partner if your in-house team does not have the necessary technical expertise.
Download the Free eBook
Download the Free eBook
Choosing the right starting point
Choosing the right starting point
To avoid falling into pitfalls, you need to identify them first and after years of research, a few trends have emerged. For instance, a significant chunk of cloud projects makes a major mistake right at the beginning - picking the wrong applications/workloads to migrate. Starting off on the wrong foot means these companies are more likely to face issues later on.
Accept that the application or workload you need most on the cloud may not be the best one to begin your migration with. Ideally, your first-mover application shouldn’t be too complex (few or no dependencies, for instance), representative of the rest of your app portfolio, used often (to facilitate testing), and have moderate business value. Far too often businesses choose their biggest and most business-critical app as their first-mover advantage, often because:
- these are the most expensive on-prem apps
- stand most to gain from modernization
- on-prem backend simply cannot support the frontend anymore
However, the complexity and availability requirements result in delays and testing bottlenecks as developers struggle to balance experiments and live traffic. At the same time, costs continue to mount which adds administrative pressure as well.
Another easy pitfall to fall into is not sure of the cloud services fully. The Google Cloud ecosystem is massive, containing hundreds of services, dozens of which are designed specifically to make cloud migrations easier. Instead of taking the time to understand these services or working with a certified GCP partner, companies use their existing on-prem knowledge which results in additional costs and time, all while delivering a less optimized end-product.
What your journey to the cloud should look like?
What your journey to the cloud should look like?
So what should an ideal cloud journey look like? Well, it should be a systematic approach that contains four seemingly obvious but highly underrated phases: assess, plan, migrate, and optimize.
Each phase and the steps within are designed with one goal: organizing the chaos and helping you make informed decisions. For instance, the assessment phase helps you establish your IT landscape and answer an important question like:
- What kind of applications do I have?
- What problems exist in my environment?
- What are my bandwidth requirements?
- What should I consider for business continuity?
- What devices exist in my environment?
Similarly, the planning phase helps you identify the different options you have in terms of first- mover application, migration strategy, and landing zone. It also guides you through the process of evaluating and choosing the best option.
Most importantly, the assessment and planning phases ensure you have a complete picture of your app portfolio, migration goals, the total cost of ownership (TCO), and Return on Investment (ROI) right in the beginning which is monumental in creating a plan that won’t change later on.
Additionally, there are best practices that can follow during the actual migration process to further improve your cloud migration such as:
- adopting stakeholder buy-in and approving a comprehensive roadmap can increase migration speed by up to 10 times.
- Pre-validating cloud application performance and availability to de-risk application stakeholders
- Making the migration fast and seamless with GCP’s non-invasive cutover technology
And of course, the migration does not end until all of your workloads are fully optimized and making full use of their cloud environment. Thankfully, there are tried and tested practices for this as well, such as pre-and post-migration rightsizing, financial governance cost controls, built- in reporting, alerts, forecasting, and more.
Learning from others
Learning from others
On top of all this, this eBook providers readers insights into real-world cloud migrations, taking a look at cloud migration projects at popular companies including Twitter, Lush, Cardinal Health, and more. Each case study looks at the major challenges faced as well as how the company managed to overcome them.
