| | December 20198CIOReviewIMPORTANCE OF SCALABLE AND SUSTAINABLE CLOUD MIGRATIONBy Pankaj Gupta, Global IT Director Supported by Devashish Meher, Cloud Architect, Boston Consulting Group(BCG)1. IntroductionWe all live in an era, where cloud sound-bites and cloud buzzwords are new norm in the market. These high end technical acronyms sound promising, very encouraging and motivating dur-ing technical debates, interactions and discussions with any of the audience around the globe. But when it comes to a real world implementation, even a simple migration may create a night-mare if not envisioned minutely keep-ing the desired objective or business value in mind.Business leaders sometimes tend to get driven by factors which might solve an immediate business problem, achieve short term business value or follow an organizational short term mandate. Though these reasons are lucrative enough to get into cloud adoption but one has to be very thought-ful and should understand the delivered value standpoint from short term to long term benefits, risks and challenges while planning the adoption & migration.Apart from the above factors, a cloud migration comes with benefits like Flexible Scalability, Reduction in TCO, Location Independence and ease of Environment handling for cases like Business Continuity Planning/ High Availability and Disaster Recovery.Although we have a lot of benefits but we should not ignore some of the probable risks like Data maintenance and manageability, Compliances and Cloud provider dependency and Lock-in, and that too with least transparency in ownership. 2. AbstractWith the advent of 4.0 era (i.e Service 4.0 or Industry 4.0), data is now becoming the new oil, global markets needs to be prescient and proactive in their strategy for Data explosion management which if not planned with foresightedness for Application consumption will result in a degradation of Applications. This will further implicate into high TCO with uncontrolled storage and compute management.This transition will not only impact the industries but also redefine the way they adopt the technologies, one of the most prominent being strategizing for Cloud Adoption and Migration.Once a company has concluded Adoption they need to understand various Migration Strategies and models before actually planning the same.3. Migration Strategies & ModelsMajorly speaking there are four Strategic models on which Cloud Migration is based 3.1 Lift and ShiftWhen enterprise want to choose to move an application to cloud environment without making any changes, this model is being referred as Lift-and-Shift model. This model requires negligible upfront effort in migration process, hence it is pretty fast to deploy. Though it makes an enterprise migrated to cloud but it doesn't generate any of the cloud associated benefits to the organization as it remains in same legacy architecture but outside the physical boundaries. In fact if the company grows exponentially then TCO is directly impacted with, thereby resulting in skyrocket expenses paid to the Cloud Vendor in mid to long term.3.2 RefactoringAnother approach is to choose an application with a necessary architectural changes, redesign and reconsider entire technology stack which can bring the best value for the organization. This model is referred as Re-architect (refactor) model. In this model, enterprise takes full advantage of the cloud native features and associated benefits and it also helps an enterprise to run applications in a cost effective way on cloud. However it needs more upfront cost for re-architecture and redesign, but in the long run, it comes with a lots of benefit.Although, it comes with a risk of shifting critical legacy application without right level of knowledge base about its integration across entire length and breadth of the enterprise. To achieve real value of the cloud, it is prudent that enterprise must explore and move all non-proprietary, non-critical applications first by re-architecture/redesign to IN MY OPINIONPankaj Gupta, Global IT Director
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