Amazon Web Services recommend 6R strategies which should be considered in any cloud migration project.
The benefits for business of moving critical business systems to the cloud are extensive and ones which businesses of all sizes strive to achieve. Those benefits are things which businesses of all sizes strive to achieve. Operating crucial business services on the cloud offers the opportunity to achieve them quicker. However, sometimes it can be a daunting challenge and you might not know where to start.
A cloud migration project will include an extensive evaluation of all technologies, applications, solutions being utilised throughout an organisation. This will determine the scale and timing of the cloud migration. For example, should there be a phased approach or a full migration, should some applications be retained and are there any which should be closed down and don’t therefore, form part of the migration project. This discovery phase analysis is crucial to any successful cloud migration project.
At Pulsion, our cloud migration services follow the Amazon Web Services 6R strategies approach.
What are the 6R strategies:
Rehost or “lift and shift”
This is most commonly used where an organisation want to migrate quickly and often to meet a specific business case. We have seen cases where companies have rehosted all of their applications without any cloud optimisation and have still seen results of 30% reduction in costs overall. It is possible to go for a quick rehost “lift and shift” approach to meet the required fast timescales to achieve a business goal and can then work on further optimisation once the applications are hosted in the cloud.
Replatform or “lift, tinker and shift”
In this scenario some minor cloud optimisations are carried out to achieve a specific benefit without altering the core architecture of the application. By making optimisations prior to migrating to achieve business objectives it is possible to see significant savings in licensing costs.
Repurchase
This involves moving to a newer version of a solution or a completely new solution. In a lot of cases this involves a move to an off the shelf SaaS product to achieve savings in time and costs for specific areas of the business. For example, moving CRM functions to a tool such as Salesforce.
Refactor
This involves adding features, scaling up or improving performance that would be harder to achieve in the solution’s existing environment. This is driven by very specific business needs which require features, scaleability or performance improvements which would be extremely difficult to achieve within the existing environment. A typical example is one of business continuity and scaleability and often involves a move from a monolithic architecture to server-less. For example, ticketing websites are much easier to scale to meet peaks in demand if hosted on a serverless environment.
Retire
Turning off applications, assets or solutions which are no longer used should be turned off and allows resources to be deployed to areas which are more widely utilised and bring greater business benefit. The discovery and analysis phase at the start of a cloud migration project will determine what is no longer required in every department / functional area of the business. There are examples of organisations who have found 10%-20% of enterprise IT portfolios which are no longer used or required and can be turned off right away seeing savings immediately before the migration of active applications even takes place.
Retain
Where some existing systems remain in operation while others are migrated to the cloud. Often this is because they are too complex or challenging and would require more extensive work to manage the migration so those that can be moved are while these are retained and plans put in place for managing a later move. This also applies to anything which has been recently upgraded and wouldn’t be cost effective to move right away therefore, retention with intent to move at a later date is a big part of a cloud migration project and decisions on this would come from the initial discovery and analysis phase of a project.
Business Case
We have mentioned a discovery / analysis phase which should be the starting point for every cloud migration project. This will determine the approach and will look at the full IT portfolio of the organisation and apply the 6R strategies to each one. This will produce estimated savings which could be achieved and also helps to build the business case for the move. A robust business case is imperative for a cloud migration project to be successful. Set out the outcomes the business wants to achieve and use cloud migration as the facilitator to achieving those benefits.
Successfully implementing a cloud migration project can result in significant benefits for an organisation with the main ones being:
- Introduce faster times to market
- Improve workforce agility to react to change
- Scale easily with business growth
- Respond quickly to changing market conditions
- Spend less time managing on-premise infrastructure and upgrades
- Remove the need to invest in hardware or software
- Achieve significant cost savings
- Reduce risk with a secure environment
Cloud migration shouldn’t simply be thought of as moving IT operations to a new environment, it is a business transformation model that can significantly improve business operations with huge results.
Are you ready to take the next steps? At Pulsion, we take a consultative approach and offer a completely free consultation to determine what you want to achieve and recommend the best route for you to achieve it. In doing so – we would apply the 6R strategies outlined here to help prepare your business case for cloud migration. Your free consultation is the first step to achieving the benefits we’ve outlined so let’s talk?
