As technology permeates every industry, enterprises have to put in efforts to drive agility by quickly adapting their businesses to meet new application, product, and service needs. One of the best drivers of digital transformation and business agility undoubtedly is being on the cloud – allowing businesses to accelerate IT service delivery, enjoy greater scalability, respond to changing market conditions, and improve customer experience.
Yet, many organizations encounter several unforeseen complexities in migrating workloads to the cloud – restricting them from driving maximum value through their cloud investments. To overcome challenges and optimize results, organizations need to proceed with immense agility and dexterity with their cloud migration.
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Adopting an Agile Approach for Cloud Migrations
When it comes to migrating workloads to the cloud, organizations face many challenges in their journey. These include:
- Identifying business drivers
- Deciding which workloads to move together and in what order
- Maintaining the reliability and performance of critical business services during the migration
- Ensuring proper levels of security
- Choosing the right instance type and cost model based on their real-time utilization
Many organizations spend years traversing through this maze of challenges on the journey to the cloud. However, in a digital world, if they cannot migrate to the cloud quickly, they stand the risk of having disgruntled employees, poor business performance, bad reputation, and even dissatisfied customers.
Adopting an agile approach for their cloud migrations is a great way to quickly move to the cloud and to innovate faster. The cloud demands speed, and agile processes can offer the level of speed needed to drive business excellence. Using Agile best practices, organizations can break the planning and execution of cloud migration into a series of well-defined, iterative, and repeatable processes. Since each scrum can focus on a specific set of elements, organizations can ensure their migration is guided by rigorous processes and governance, with extensive reporting at each stage.
The Importance of Having an Agile Migration Approach
With the business landscape changing so quickly, digital organizations cannot depend on traditional waterfall approaches to cloud migrations. With new technology, new processes, and new trends constantly change, using an agile approach to cloud migrations is the only way to ensure your business is updated while you progress through your cloud journey. Agile practices:
- Make it easy for businesses to update their infrastructure, processes, products, and services and keep pace with changing customer needs
- Help engineering teams migrate their workloads to the cloud and they bring with them benefits for the entire organization: better communication and collaboration, quick and easy access to resources, better product releases, and improved customer support
- Enable organizations to become responsive to customers as well as new market opportunities, introduce features and fixes in a fraction of the time as opposed to traditional approaches
- Allow all aspects of the migration to be performed in shorter sprints, allowing organizations to learn quickly to improve the quality and speed of migration
3 Agile Cloud Migration Tips
If agile cloud migration seems daunting, you’re not alone. Given that cloud migration is already a time-consuming and complex process, the thought of having to adopt Agile processes for migration can seem extremely intimidating. Here are 3 agile adoption tips that can help in streamlining the process as well as in maximizing the value from cloud migration:
1. Fragment Migration into Small Repeatable Processes
Given the basic premise of Agile where tasks are broken into small, easily repeatable processes, for agile cloud migrations as well, it is important to break the migration into easily manageable iterations or scrums. Since each scrum focuses on specific elements of the migration, such an approach can help in more detailed and in-depth cloud planning as well as in ensuring every workload or application is moved with immense precision and efficiency.
2. Set Easily Achievable Milestones
Cloud migrations can be an extremely complex processes, especially in the absence of a robust migration plan. While planning for an agile cloud migration, it is important to set easily achievable milestones, so the migration team can channelize their priorities and work on aspects that need to be attended to first.
3. Make It Continuous
Agile cloud migrations cannot be a one-time activity or a milestone that can be reached and forgotten about. Just like moving to the cloud requires organization to set aside a considerable amount of time, the evolution to Agile will likely take months (or even years) to truly deliver value. What is needed is for organizations to build a culture of continuous learning and improvement to derive maximum value from agile cloud migrations.
Widen Scope for Innovation
As digital technology becomes more critical to growth and innovation, enterprises need to bring their businesses up to speed and outdo competitors with new products and services. Cloud migration is a revolutionary way of cutting upfront costs and speeding the delivery of new applications or services – especially when done using agile practices. Since cloud migrations are known to be long and expensive; an agile approach can help break the migration into easily repeatable processes in a way that maximizes migration efficiency and speed. Agile cloud migrations can help businesses bring products into the market quickly while facilitating them to achieve competitive growth and widen the scope for business innovation.
Interested in migrating to the cloud? Contact an expert at Synoptek today.
