In session two of our three-part re:Imagine Series in tandem with AWS re:Invent, Enterprise Architect Scott Evers, Principal Cloud Automation Engineer David Bagan, Product Manager Chris Massey, and our special guest from Morpheus, VP of Technology Alliances, Brad Parks explore the world of cloud migration and management of workloads.
The cloud helps organizations drive huge savings in time and costs. But the cloud also introduces a new set of challenges: multi-cloud vendor management, management of consumption rates, and complex security and compliance concerns.
In session one, Scott described the 6Rs and how they establish a framework and strategy for moving workloads and applications to the cloud, taking into account the application complexity, the necessary cloud and cybersecurity toolsets, and the current industry best practices. Below, he describes the top three, best fit for cloud migration and management.
The 5 Keys to Success in Cloud Migration and Management
As you’re looking at migrating to the cloud, you need to understand why you’re making the move. Jumping into your cloud journey can be a risky play, so you need to prepare before you go all in. The following 5 keys will help you understand, plan, and set your business up for success.
1. Understand what you want to achieve by migrating a specific workload into cloud services. That will drive a lot of design and implementation decisions you make, what cloud you wind up in, or whether or not you decide that cloud isn’t the right fit for a particular workload. At the end of the day, you want to achieve a positive business outcome, so understanding what that is before diving into a migration is essential.
2. Choose the appropriate migration approach. Rehost, Replatform, and Refactor.
3. Define secure and robust architectures. You don’t want to bring a lot of risk into the organization as you make this transition. Things that have been traditionally secure and robust in an on-prem world most likely need to change as you move to cloud to take advantage of the different operating models and services available.
4. Manage your cloud environment.
5. Manage your workloads post-migration.
Planning Your Migration
In our second session, Scott discusses 3 key Rs when planning your migration and their paths to AWS.
1. Rehost – move as-is to the cloud. This is the fastest path with minimized effort. It has large data center scale migrations, low up-front effort, reduces improvements in scalability, manageability, security, and resiliency, and is the largest ongoing cost.
2. Replatform – move to the cloud with some improvements. This path enables opportunistic improvements, reduces ongoing operational burden, has moderate up-front effort, enables some improvements in scalability, manageability, security, and resiliency, and enables cost tradeoff options.
3. Refactor – re-architect all or some portion of the application. This path offers the most maximized value. It enables significant improvements, significantly reduces ongoing operational burden, fully enables scalable, resilient, and secure systems with DevOps and infrastructure as code, has high up-front effort, and can significantly reduce TCO.
Tips and Recommendations on Preventative and Detective Controls
When you’re designing your security program or cloud governance, you should think through your preventative and detective actions.
Preventative – What can people do in the cloud in the first place? You should use lease privilege access and have role-based access controls, so you know exactly which rights every group of people has for each area of your technology.
Detective – This layer is among the most important because you can’t have corrective controls without detecting it first. But to get there, you have to have thought through “what am I going to look for?”
Post-Migration Cloud Challenges
Businesses are realizing that not every workload needs to be in the public cloud or in the private cloud, so they’ve taken a more distributive approach. However, there are a lot of inefficiencies regardless of these use cases. After ten years of being in the hybrid cloud, multi-cloud world, Morpheus has seen the difficulties that come along with having a hybrid cloud. A hybrid, multi-cloud is more of an inevitability than a strategy in most cases, so whether that’s new applications teams getting spun up or mergers and acquisitions, you’re going to have hybrid cloud whether you like it, know it, or not. It really breaks down to one question, how do you wrap your arms around that?
Watch the full webinar to listen to Product Manager Chris Massey, and our special guest from Morpheus, VP of Technology Alliances, Brad Parks engage in a full-on discussion around cloud challenges.
Don’t miss the final re:Imagine event coming your way on Friday, December 18th at 12:00pm CST. We have lunch covered – and you could win an Amazon shopping spree. Sign up for “What’s on the Horizon” today.
