A Practical Cloud Migration Guide for Government: How to Eat the "Migration Elephant" One Bite at a Time
Introduction – What is the Cloud Migration Elephant?
“There is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time,” said
Desmond Tutu, the South African Anglican archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize winner.
In this famous quote, Mr. Tutu meant that everything in life that seems daunting, overwhelming, and even impossible can be accomplished gradually by taking on just a little at a time.
In the federal arena IT, we are equating the “migration elephant” to the full migration to the cloud. Just as you should not fear elephants, the cloud migration process is not scary – especially when done correctly, with one small bite at a time. In other words, with the correct approach, there is no reason to be afraid of the cloud migration process.
This strategy is ideal for government enterprise-wide cloud migration, where it is possible to avoid duplications, and achieve tremendous costs-savings by removing organizational stovepipes.
The Prerequisite Step: Define the Elephant with a Cloud Readiness Assessment
By preparing a cloud-readiness assessment, it is much easier to understand the scope of the challenge, and fully get rid of any “elephant fear factor.” This provides a big picture perspective that will make eating the government cloud migration elephant much more palatable, and easier to digest.
A core part of government cloud migration is diving deeper into the current application load to understand which apps are already “cloud friendly.” This can be achieved by developing a scatter-plot of where all apps fall on the cloud readiness spectrum. Makpar recommends focusing on moving the easier ones first, such as payroll systems in Java Linux that are standalone without dependencies, for an effective government cloud migration.
The cloud readiness assessment is a tried and true process, which is all about application rationalization, and should take all government cloud mandates into perspective. It should also include gaining an understanding of what aspects industry partners/vendors will manage in the overall cloud migration process.
During this process, it’s also ideal to get a handle on all of the data security issues, inventory all “parts of the elephant,” develop a migration plan and schedule, as well as understand all of the internal resources needed.
From there, it’s best to know what bites of the elephant lie in front of you, and manage everything one bite at a time.
One Bite at a Time: The Practical Steps to Eating the Migration Elephant
Bite #1 – Understand the Full Migration Scope and Challenges: As with the cloud readiness assessment step, this is a critical first part for developing the overall plan, timing and resource allocation for a cloud migration. This should include developing a list of the most cloud-friendly to the least cloud-friendly applications.
Then, focus on migrating the “low hanging fruit,” which are the easiest to migrate. During this bite, it is also a good time to fully understand all of the motivations and drivers for doing a cloud migration.
Bite #2 – As-Is/To-Be Analysis: This is where you understand the current and future state and essentially freeze the applications in time, and discuss what applications can and cannot be moved – and could be considered part of the cloud readiness assessment prerequisite step. During this bite, you are simply moving data from point A to point B. This is not a time undertake any major IT updates or modernization efforts.
It is important to note that you can run your business up until the migration time for a specific workload, freeze it, then continue doing what you were doing. It’s also easy to roll applications back – if needed – because the apps have only been copied to the cloud. You can also prioritize what apps need to be migrated, and group them together based on dependencies.
Bite #3 – Understanding Dependencies and Data Flows: Understanding the up-and-down stream dependencies to know where the data is actually going is the critical next bite of the elephant. This is the time to uncover what communications and latency restrictions may exist, and address any data regulatory requirements based on the country where your data resides.
This is also the time to gain a full understanding of all physical assets and how this will impact internal IT personnel. It's critical to remember that this is just a new datacenter – and modernization is not yet the focus. As such, this type of migration should not negatively impact personnel.
Bite #4 – Application Load/Scalability: In addition to understanding what applications run in the cloud, now’s the time to see if you need auto-scaling, as well as gain insights around workloads and individual applications to understand overall application scalability.
Understanding in-place performance and having performance metrics in place that are quantifiable, measurable and objective is a critical starting point at this stage. Applications also need to be state-less to be fully scalable and able to spin up new servers, if needed.
Bite #5 – User Base: During this bite, it is critical to understand how the cloud migration will affect end-users and clients, and how users will access the cloud. Typically, for each workload there is an associated list of users, and an active directory for user authentication.
Bite #6 – Impact Analysis: How is the cloud migration going to affect day-to-day operations? Once you understand the big picture, this is the time to set up a high-level schedule of what applications will be migrated – based on dependencies of the applications.
Once you have the schedule in place, go through the details and ports and protocols and map traffic from on-premise to the cloud, and understand how does the change impact us. It’s also ideal to understand the SLAs around the servers, and develop run books that describe how to access systems and support the turnover of operations (i.e., how to log into the servers, what to look for in alerts, how to stop/start systems, etc.).
Bite #7 – Data Usage: Since data usage in the cloud costs money, this is the bite where you gain an understanding of how much data (data flow, modeling and usage) you have, and fully know the usage costs. In addition, data usage can change over time, and comparing costs pre- and post-cloud migration can mitigate budgeting fears. While the cloud offers unlimited resources, the reality is that high data usage can become costly.
Bite #8 – Target Modernization: As this process is a migration of “like-for-like,” and not a larger IT modernization effort, this is the point where agencies can start thinking about modernization.
This is also a time to look at what the cloud promises and take advantage of auto-scaling, geographic redundancies and multiple availability zones, edge caching, and consider replacing current work with services, and decommission non-productive servers. You may consider looking at overall performance improvements, and implement critical disaster recovery solutions.
In addition, by moving to an open source database offering (i.e., PostgreSQL), rather than using Oracle licenses, it will be more cost-effective and easier to target overall modernization efforts.
Conclusion
While government cloud migration efforts may seem daunting – much like eating an elephant – this tried and true process will make it possible for any agency to be cloud-enabled. Again, it is important to understand that cloud migrations can happen in very small and digestible bites, which will set the stage for more advanced IT modernization efforts.
Makpar’s Government Cloud Migration Capabilities
Makpar has deep expertise in helping government agencies to migrate to the cloud, ultimately offering increased effectiveness of data health and IT systems performance, and major savings in an agency’s IT budget.
In addition, below are more content resources to prepare any agency for a cloud migration:
Breaking Down Cultural Barriers to Cloud Adoption for Federal Government Agencies
4 Ways to Migrate a Workload to the Cloud for Federal Government Agencies
Please contact us here for more information about how help get your agency on the path to the cloud.