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3 Cloud Constraints and Challenges 11 Plan Your Approach 15 The Seven-Step Migration Plan 18 In Parallel with the Seven Steps 43 Cost Management in the Cloud 45 In Conclusion 46 iii... P

Steve Francis

Preparing for Your Migration to the Cloud

7 Steps to Success

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Preparing for Your Migration to the Cloud

by Steve Francis

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Table of Contents

Preface v

Preparing for Your Migration to the Cloud 1

Introduction 1

What’s the Attraction of the Cloud? 3

Cloud Constraints and Challenges 11

Plan Your Approach 15

The Seven-Step Migration Plan 18

In Parallel with the Seven Steps 43

Cost Management in the Cloud 45

In Conclusion 46

iii

How to best take advantage of the cloud is a frequent topic of dis‐cussion among all levels of an organization’s IT team Often, the dis‐cussion will be couched in terms of enterprise transformation, ordigital transformation, or datacenter consolidation, but at theirheart, these projects usually involve cloud migrations

Cloud migrations can bring great benefit, but the technology is newenough, and changing rapidly enough, that even if you develop anaccurate business case, your organization may not achieve thosebenefits, since your staff is probably inexperienced in cloud migra‐tions That’s exactly the situation this report is intended to help with.While there is no universal script for cloud migrations, there aresteps you should consider in planning any move to the cloud One

of the big risks in any project is the “unknown-unknowns.” Thisreport won’t give you all the answers, but it will help you highlightthe questions that you should be asking in planning a cloud adop‐tion It is intended to be useful for everyone that is involved in, orwants to advocate for, a cloud migration—from the CIO down tothe engineering staff And I would posit that practically every orga‐nization should be thinking about cloud migration in order to main‐tain the agility it needs to be competitive I would also suggest thatfor technical staff, knowledge of cloud technologies and cloudmigration principles is as sure a thing for career advancement asthere is at the moment

When LogicMonitor started, the cloud was in its infancy Indeed,virtualization was just becoming big LogicMonitor has been able tonavigate the transition from bare metal, to virtualization, and now

v

the cloud, hybrid cloud, serverless, and whatever else technologybrings.

Much of the wisdom in this report is directly attributable to theexpertise, knowledge and insight of our customers, and their will‐ingness to share and discuss their challenges and solutions

For that, I will always be grateful

Cheers,

Steve Francis

Preparing for Your Migration to

the Cloud

Introduction

The cloud is everywhere

You know that the cloud stats are trending up, but did you knowhow fast? According to Forrester, the global public cloud marketwill jump from $146 billion in 2017 to $178 billion in 2018 Afterthat, it is expected to grow at a 22-percent compound annual growthrate (CAGR)

For comparison purposes, growth of the overall global tech sector in

2018 will be just five percent, and even if it smashed predictions itwould get only to the seven-percent-plus range Thus, an increasingproportion of global information technology spending will be on thecloud (According to IDC, global information technology spendingwill reach $4.8 trillion in 2018.)

Not surprisingly, the cloud migration market is heating up, as well.

After all, these businesses investing in cloud technology generallyneed services to help them succeed in their transformations The

global cloud migration services market is predicted to expand from

$3.17 billion in 2017 to $9.47 billion by 2022, at an even higherCAGR of 24.5 percent

Most notable about all this is the move to the public cloud Accord‐ing to McKinsey, almost 80 percent of businesses plan to have morethan 10 percent of their workloads in the public cloud within threeyears According to Spiceworks, these workloads range from backup

1

(the most popular), to email hosting, to productivity apps, andeverything in between (see Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1 Budget breakdown of cloud spend (source: “The 2018 State

ability and time to market/agility rank high, as well, as both werechosen by 32 percent of businesses More on this shortly.)

But here’s the kicker: after the migration cloud costs become the number one pain point.

According to 451 Research:

Cloud is an inexpensive and easily accessible technology People consume more, thereby spending more, and forget to control or limit their consumption With ease of access, inevitably some resources get orphaned with no ownership; these continue to incur costs Some resources are overprovisioned to provide extra capacity

as a “just in case” solution Unexpected line items, such as band‐ width, are consumed The IT department has limited visibility or control of these items.

Indeed, moving to the cloud is a fairly low-risk investment, andaccrues fairly moderate costs According to one recent study, half(50 percent) of the companies surveyed estimate the cost of migra‐tion to be between $100 and $500 per machine, with just 17 percentestimating it costs more than $500 per machine

Unfortunately, there’s no how-to guide for creating an end-to-endtransition plan to prepare your enterprise for the cloud IT profes‐sionals are solving pieces of the challenge, but often in disconnectedsilos that require retrofitting—often at great opportunity cost.Make no mistake about it, moving to the cloud is a complex propo‐sition It will be worth it for your business in terms of increased agil‐ity and other benefits, but there are a lot of pitfalls that you mightwell run into—pitfalls, however, that you can learn to avoid

This report takes a prescriptive look at the best practices andsequential journey needed to ensure a successful transition Cloudmigration experts also weigh in on the various stages of the journey.The result: a how-to guide for an end-to-end transition plan to thecloud

What’s the Attraction of the Cloud?

Moving to the cloud offers many, many benefits, but in this report, Ifocus on three: operational agility, strategic focus, and—possibly—cost savings Notice I hedged on cost savings and listed it last.There’s a reason for that, which we get into later

What’s the Attraction of the Cloud? | 3

Enable Operational Agility

Operational agility is the top advantage you gain by moving to thecloud That’s because the speed at which your developers can deploynew software and the swiftness with which you can try new technol‐ogies is much faster when you don’t have to wait for IT to provisionservers and storage and networking connections You simply spin

up new instances for whatever workloads you need, and you’re set.This gives your product teams and developers the tools to releaseproducts, get feedback, and quickly iterate and improve them tohelp you meet the needs of your customers That’s what operationalagility is all about

There’s also the fact that virtually every week, Amazon, Microsoft,Google (currently the top three cloud providers), and other cloudsare rolling out new cloud-based services that, if you use them appro‐priately, can give you a competitive advantage Want to get intomachine learning? No need to build the capacity yourself—just useAmazon’s new AI service You’ll still need data scientists, of course,but you won’t need someone to build out the infrastructure You’ll

be able to get better products to market faster and roll out productssooner—and that can be a large competitive advantage

Whether you are deploying to the cloud through Infrastructure as aService (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service(SaaS), you stand to gain significant operational agility Table 1-1

provides a synopsis

Compare cloud to the alternative—the status quo If you’ve invested

in owning your own on-premises environment, you are more limi‐ted in the infrastructure that you can make available to your devel‐opers You’ve made a long-term commitment to a certain way ofdoing things This prevents you from being able to take advantage ofthe latest and greatest technologies that are being brought to market.Financially, on-premises environments typically come out of capitalexpense (CapEx) budgets, whereas cloud purchases are usually anoperating expense (OpEx) Depending on allocation of budgets inyour company or department, one financial model might be prefera‐ble over the other

Table 1-1 How cloud enables operational agility (Source: Taken from

“2018 SaaS Industry Market Report: Key Global Trends & Growth Forecasts,” FinancesOnline.)

Flexible infrastructure Dynamic

applications On-demand services Efficient management

• Get infrastructure

programmatically

provisioned

• Build applications that are quick to deploy, and optimize use of resources

• Cloud providers have many “ready-to-run”

services (such as queuing systems, databases, etc.)

• Cloud adoption can force programmatic management and best practices, due

to imposed constraints

• Faster time to deploy changes

• Shorter release cycles can lead to faster product/

market fit

• Complex services immediately available for use by application developers

• Don’t need specialized expertise

in running things like Elasticache

• Faster monetization

of innovation

• Automated flexible management

• Lower cost of monitoring

• Reduced downtime

With a cloud infrastructure, you get access to the best equipmentavailable: the newest Intel processors, the most optimized RAMmemory, solid-state drive (SSD) storage, arrays of graphics process‐ing units (GPUs), and even cloud-programmable hardware Thiscomes with a wide ecosystem of software platforms to choose from:managed databases and warehouses, orchestration platforms, cach‐ing, queuing systems, and just about anything you need for any soft‐ware architecture

The impact on your business when you move to the cloud can beimmediate, especially if you operate in a competitive market that isadvancing swiftly

Capital One moved one of its largest customer-facing apps—itsmobile banking app—to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2016 SaidJason D Valentino, director of reliability engineering at Capital OneDigital, “The move to AWS was a way of removing the constraintspreventing them [Capital One developers] from developing theirideal applications The move was neither an edict nor a product

What’s the Attraction of the Cloud? | 5

goal It was a way to build the best application using our best skillsand tools.” Valentino went on to say:

“Moving forward, Capital One Mobile (as well as the otherconsumer-facing products owned by our team) will have infrastruc‐ture that moves at a speed that keeps up with the needs of our prod‐uct In the months to come, we look forward to further exploringthe advantages the cloud continues to bring As well as redefiningour own team definition of what it means to ’ship early and shipoften.’”

In another example, Walgreens achieved significant organizationalagility by recognizing that it could use the cloud to meet its custom‐ers’ demands the way they wanted them met: on their mobile devi‐ces Consumers are now used to, and even prefer, app-driveninteractivity compared to traditional ways of interacting with theretailer Today, Walgreens’ mobile app drives about 40 percent of theretailer’s digital traffic, with cloud-based features like Refill by Scanand QuickPrints helping to completely transform the business andhelping it nimbly stay ahead of competitors in an industry that isbeing rapidly disrupted by innovation

To give a counter-example, here’s how not being into the cloud chal‐

lenges you: We were talking to a company that eventually became acustomer of LogicMonitor The reason the company initially came

to us is because they were in a merger and acquisition (M&A) sce‐nario, in which the company it was acquiring was geographicallyseparate from LogicMonitor and running its own datacenters Thecompany couldn’t figure out a way to monitor the other company’sremote on-premises infrastructure within the time constraints ofclosing the M&A deal With its existing on-premises monitoringsoftware, LogicMonitor was stuck with slow on-premises systemsthat required it to provision new servers, ship them out physically,and install them on the remote premises simply to get visibility intothe other company’s infrastructure This caused the deal to fall apart

—a very expensive side effect The cloud would have solved this, ofcourse

Maintain Strategic Focus

The second benefit that moving to the cloud gives you is strategicfocus on your business

Effectively, strategic focus builds off agility because you needn’tworry about having to run a datacenter After all, managing a data‐center is difficult and complex You need good, smart people to han‐dle the provisioning and figure out the data management andsecurity, among other tasks Power management, space planning,cooling, contracts with ISPs—these are all complex tasks thatrequire not-insignificant resources allocated to them Managingstorage and networks in particular are very specialized skill sets Ifyou could repurpose these valuable employees on initiatives that aremore strategic to your business, such as developing applications ordesigning customer- and employee-facing systems rather thanputting energy into keeping infrastructure running, you’re naturallymore competitive.

Philip Tuttle, a cloud consultant for London-based Orange BusinessSystems, provides cloud migration services for customers as part of

a broad portfolio of IT consulting services He says that his custom‐ers are primarily looking to take advantage of the cloud to moveaway from a constant construct-and-refresh cycle of on-premisesphysical systems They particularly want to turn a CapEx investmentcycle into a more effective OpEx financial model so that they canplow cash back into their core businesses “That’s probably still thebiggest driver,” says Tuttle “They don’t want to have to manage andrefresh their own infrastructure hosted in their own datacenter.They want to leverage the financial benefits of moving to the cloud,the scalability, the stand-up times, and basically shift from this leadweight of having to manage or maintain their own infrastructure tobetter managing their core business.”

This is definitely the trend According to IDC, global spending onpublic cloud services and infrastructure will exceed $160 billion in

2018, an increase of 23.2% over 2017, reflecting the rapid shift toOPEX from CAPEX business models

“First and foremost, you take a huge burden off the shoulders ofyour IT staff,” agrees James Bell, integrated global services generalmanager of Long View Systems, an information technology servicesand solutions company based in Calgary, Canada

“When you think of old monolithic IT organizations with hundreds

of IT people supporting them, that’s just not sustainable anymorefor a variety of reasons,” says Bell Among other things, it involveskeeping track of all of your own hardware and software licensing

What’s the Attraction of the Cloud? | 7

requirements, your own warranty information, and having to con‐stantly care and feed that infrastructure It takes focus away fromyour business, he says.

“If you’ve got the right cloud provider and your data is safe and issecure and is auditable and your cloud provider is doing all the rightthings, all of that overhead is taken away from you,” says Bell

“Without all of that pain and suffering, your life is a heck of a loteasier.”

Consuming IT infrastructure as a utility frees you up to concentrate

on what really matters, says Bell

“Running IT infrastructure isn’t the core business of most compa‐nies,” says Bell “If we look at core versus context, running IT infra‐structure is just context.” He stresses that making money or drivingvalue for shareholders or delivering services to the market is what’simportant “I personally think that’s the number one benefit of mov‐ing to the cloud,” he says

(Possibly) Cut Costs

Businesses have great expectations of the cost-cutting potential ofthe cloud As we mentioned earlier, they cited it as their primarydriver for moving to the cloud, according to 451 Research’s 2018

study on cloud adoption

However, it doesn’t always work out that way Costs often rise 451Research found that the main reason for this was that companiesconsume more compute, storage, and networking resources afterthey’ve moved to the cloud In other words, it’s there, and easy toprovision, so they use it And not all wisely Wasting cloud resourceswas the second reason that cloud spend increased, according to thesurvey

451 Research called this the “Jevons Paradox,” in which ease ofaccess to technology and lower costs drive companies to consumemore of it Unit costs might be lower, but overall costs rise

451 Research thus concluded that in hoping to cut costs by moving

to the cloud, businesses find that “reality doesn’t match expecta‐tions.” Indeed, costs, initially the driver of most cloud adoption ini‐tiatives, become the number one pain point following migration

How much money you could even theoretically save also depends

on the type of workload you are moving to the cloud For example,

if you are running a server that has 64 GB of memory and an array

of SSDs, and you need that server constantly up to run a critical workload—for example, global order processing on a 24/7basis—it’s going to be much more expensive, by most metrics, to runthat in the cloud than it is to run it in your own datacenter

business-After all, you can buy a server like that for approximately $7,000from Dell, whereas renting it from Amazon costs about $1,200 amonth In most cases, it would be much cheaper to spend the $7,000upfront and run it yourself Of course, running it yourself requiresdatacenter space and power and air conditioning and so on, but still

at a net cost on any kind of scale, it’s going to be significantlycheaper to run your own IT infrastructure than to run it in thecloud over an extended period of time

But if your IT infrastructure has any type of variable component, thecloud could be a benefit from a cost perspective Suppose that youneed 50 servers for your application, but only during business hours

—during off hours you can rely on just 10 servers If you scale up inthe day and down at night, yes, cloud can be much cheaper

However, there’s another consideration With cost, there’s also the

problem of cloud litter These are the cloud instances that are spun

up and then forgotten It’s very difficult to get a handle on these Forexample, when your developers release a new system, they mightspin up a new cloud instance They might provision elastic blockstorage volumes on the cloud that are rather costly But then theydecide they need a bigger system so they spin out another, largercloud instance, move everything over to that, and then forget to shutdown the other one That’s very, very common

Then you get a giant bill, due to the fact that you have 1,200 instan‐ces instead of the 1,000 you need No one goes through and checksthem—the operations teams often don’t see the bills, and the financeteam has no insight into what servers are actually needed So even ifyou engineer your cloud infrastructure for cost savings, it’s quitelikely that you won’t end up with any Because cloud resources are soeasy to provision and so easy to pay for, it’s very difficult to maintain

good cloud hygiene.

It makes sense that businesses are searching for savings in the cloud.It’s one of the most proclaimed benefits of migrating “Most IT

What’s the Attraction of the Cloud? | 9

departments are squeezed for budget, looking for cost optimizationsacross the infrastructure, and they think the cloud is an easy answer

to that,” says Orange’s Tuttle

“It’s the responsibility of people like myself as consultants to resetexpectations and to try to explain to customers where they can gaincost benefits, but indirectly rather than directly,” he says

Yes, there are some potential cost benefits that can be had frommoving to the cloud Utilizing the right cloud services can reduceyour operational overhead and reduce the need for IT infrastructureheadcount or expertise

“In traditional infrastructures you’ve got fairly static monolithicworkloads which are unmoving,” says Tuttle “Why move those tothe cloud? You’ll only pay more.”

Indeed, using the most popular mode of shifting to the cloud—“liftand shift”—it’s especially tricky to get the payback you anticipate

“Whereas if you shift highly varying workloads, you pay only for

what you use at the times you use it That will save you,” says Tuttle.

Many companies eventually resign themselves to the fact that cloudcosts will be higher They realize that the operational agility that theyget out of it makes it worth it So they’ll accept the fact that it’s going

to cost them 50 percent more in their IT budget for the infrastruc‐ture component,” says Tuttle “They’re satisfied with the advantagethat they can develop apps much quicker, that they can release faster,and they can learn faster, so they actually bring in revenue ratherthan holding up the business through infrastructure “plumbing.”When in their cloud journeys do businesses experience this “aha”—that the chief benefits are not cost savings and indeed might not beeasily quantifiable?

Tuttle has found that businesses get fairly deep into their journeysbefore they truly understand how the cloud will benefit them Onechallenge he’s experienced with customer engagements is that mostcloud transformations begin with the infrastructure rather than theapplications team “It can be difficult to get access to the people whoare building or managing the applications, yet that’s where the realbenefits are going to begin flowing in,” says Tuttle

If an enterprise is looking to cut costs by simply moving infrastruc‐ture, that’s difficult, says Tuttle “So you need to start digging into

the application state, the application architecture, and these thingstend to take time to understand,” he says But after you get to thepoint at which you can explain how they can optimize applicationdevelopment processes, how they can deploy quicker, how they canstreamline development to deployment, and how they can optimizeapplication architecture to scaling for higher-level services thatreduce operation overheads, “that’s when businesses begin to realizethe true benefits,” says Tuttle “It’s a matter of resetting expectations.”

Cloud Constraints and Challenges

Of course, there are the inevitable challenges and drawbacks ofadopting any new technology You need to consider these whenevaluating when—and what—to move to the cloud

Your biggest constraint will be finding the right people—people whoknow how to use this incredible resource called the cloud, and howbest to take advantage of it This is a significant problem There cur‐rently is a general shortage of IT workers, and, especially, a shortage

of cloud experts

If you’re thinking of moving to the cloud, you need to foster a learn‐ing mindset in your team because new technology will always befoisted on you Always And the cloud is no exception It is evolvingmonth by month, and you must stay on top of it

Indeed, a recent study by the London School of Economics andPolitical Science, sponsored by Rackspace, found that enterprisesglobally are losing more than 5 percent of their revenue annuallydue to a lack of cloud expertise The study also found that the cloudskills gap is stifling creativity, with two-thirds (65 percent) of busi‐nesses saying they could innovate faster and more effectively if theyhad the right cloud insight

Nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of businesses report that theirorganizations have lost revenue due to a lack of cloud expertise.Beyond missing out on innovation and growth, 4 in 10 (42 percent)

of them believe a lack of skills is causing them to fall behind theircompetitors And the majority (71 percent) say that they need toinvest more in their workforces and train them to understand andtake advantage of the cloud

This is all sobering After all, if you don’t have experienced people,you’re going to have to buy, rent, or grow them Unfortunately, the

Cloud Constraints and Challenges | 11

situation a lot of companies are in is that they don’t know what theydon’t know.

One customer of ours had moved its applications into the cloud—into Amazon It had done a reasonably good job, but mistakenlythought that the cloud offered it unlimited resources that it coulduse to scale as demand grew The company didn’t realize that Ama‐zon imposed constraints on the number of machines it could have atany one time These service limits make sense for both the cloudprovider and the customer—it’s all too easy to imagine a situation inwhich a buggy provisioning system continually requests machines,possibly depleting the available machines that AWS can offer other

customers and presenting the erroneous requester with a very large

bill

This particular customer was unaware of the service limit concept—

it thought it had infinite scalability But as it turned out, the com‐pany was within two machines of its current service limit It needed

to request an increase on the service limit—but until the companyadopted LogicMonitor and received an alert about the fact that itwas close to hitting its limit, the people there were unaware that thiswas an aspect of cloud deployments that they even needed to beaware of This could have been a very expensive lesson if the com‐pany had exceeded its limit during a busy period when it needed toscale In the end, the problem was directly related to the fact that thecompany’s engineers weren’t experienced with the cloud

The bottom line is that without expertise, you’re likely to do it

wrong This can lead to cloud retrofitting: moving applications to

the cloud only to move them back again I’ve seen this happen quite

a few times The usual reason is simply that businesses have notoptimized their applications for the cloud, and they find that theyare paying an excessive price for cloud services but getting no bene‐fit

Gartner calls this a nonlinear approach to IT It argues that becauseinnovation is causing such massive disruptions in today’s globallyconnected businesses, IT and business leaders alike need to have aflexible and dynamic approach to utilizing new technologies Thismeans taking a proactive, nonlinear architectural approach for con‐tinuous evolution and what Gartner calls “complete reversibility.”

“You have to determine the degree to which your organization canreverse investment commitments and apply scenario planning to

forecast risk and responsibilities while focusing on ‘good enough’rather than ‘ideal,’” Gartner advises.

According to this model, you might move some workloads, thenyou move some back and then you move other bits It’s nonlinearmigration in that it’s not just one directional You’re bouncing thingsaround because you’re learning as you’re doing it Many of your ini‐tial trials will be wrong Although that’s reasonable—you’re new tothis, after all—if others have already made mistakes, you can learnfrom them

Let’s look at one common scenario: Suppose that a business has anapplication running in its own datacenter Typically, this applicationwould be on VMware The business could spread it among severalmachines This is important, because if a node is on a server that istaken down for maintenance, it needs to continue running some‐where else in the virtual infrastructure It’s a question of high availa‐bility

Then, suppose that the company decides to consolidate datacentersand move the application to the cloud—either Amazon or Azure.Typically, a company will do this via “lift-and-shift”—because sim‐ply moving to running the virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud iseasy Yet unless the company does a fair bit of work to redesign theapplication, the business won’t get the same level of availability ithad in its own datacenter

That’s because a lift-and-shift initiative will generally not give youthe same availability you had in your datacenter In your datacenter,you can specify policies for critical applications, control mainte‐nance windows, and even set up VMware high availability so that ifthe guest VM or the ESXi host running the guest goes down, theguest VM will be automatically restarted on a different node

In the cloud, changes to, and rebooting of, the underlying hypervi‐sor machines is outside of your control Your application might runsuccessfully for two months But Amazon might send out an emailnotice that it’s going to retire some of the instances you use for thisapplication Many people miss these emails among all the clutter intheir inboxes So, Amazon goes ahead and retires those instances,shuts them down, you lose two-thirds of your capacity, and experi‐ence an outage

Cloud Constraints and Challenges | 13

If your company has strong configuration management and provi‐sioning systems, it should be able to quickly spin up new instances

to replace the capacity, but the outage can leave a bad impression onusers And without a scripted ability to build systems, the outagecan be even more severe to both your company and to people’s jobs.This type of experience is very common According to one recentstudy, although most companies (66 percent) surveyed utilize bothredesigning and lift-and-shift cloud migration strategies, there is aclear preference (68 percent) for a simple lift-and-shift This tells usthat most companies are not making the most of the cloud

Redesigning your applications for the cloud can result in increasedavailability, and greater agility But it’s also a lot of work If yourapplication is designed to expect highly available hardware—such asclustered nodes, shared file systems, or redundant memory—youhave relied on high-availability designed hardware, not software.Such hardware is not available in the cloud, so the task of shiftingthe tolerance for failures into software is nontrivial

A truly well-designed cloud application can tolerate instances, oreven an entire availability zone or region, becoming unavailable, andstill provide the application service Of course, not every applicationneeds this level of reliability, which comes at a cost, both in terms ofresources, development time, and, significantly, agility Any applica‐tion that is designed for very high levels of reliability, whether on-premises or in the cloud, will be slower to change and develop thanless-engineered systems For this reason, some of the benefits of acloud migration can come from specifying the actual availabilityrequirements—which might be lower than the availability the sys‐tems currently support This can itself lead to substantially greateragility

Security always comes into play when discussing the cloud Almosthalf (47 percent) of businesses list it as a major concern post–cloudmigration, according to 451 Research

In one sense, your data and applications are more secure in thecloud Cloud service providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform(GCP), and Snowflake fully understand that thousands of businessestrust them They thus strive to exceed the highest security standards

in the industry as set by healthcare, financial, and governmentalinstitutions You might be pleasantly surprised that it’s easier to getcertifications like SOC2, ISO27001, HIPAA, and PCI in the cloud

because your applications will be running on a computing infra‐structure that is already certified.

You’ll also find authentication, authorization, logging, and auditingbuilt in to all major cloud platforms Additionally, security measureslike network and application firewalls, Distributed Denial-of-Service(DDOS) protection, and identity management are standardized, tes‐ted, and made available for setup and configuration The cloud pro‐viders even send out notifications of incorrectly set up securityconfigurations—such as opening up Secure Shell (SSH) ports to theworld, or databases that accept connections from anywhere

However, although cloud environments have secure computing lay‐ers, and the virtual (or logical) computing layers possess all neces‐sary enterprise-grade security measures, you’re still responsible formaking sure you have the right security policies for your architec‐ture—just as you would in an on-premises setup Effectively, thecloud provider will give you infrastructure and services you can use

to execute your security policy However, defining the security pol‐icy for your application, and ensuring it is appropriate and sup‐ported, is still up to you It is likely that the policy for yourapplication will not change, even if you move it to the cloud—yourpractice of destroying Personally Identifiable Information (PII)when a customer leaves, for example However, the practices you use

to do so might change in the cloud (You might destroy all the cloudinstances that the customer’s account lived on, for example.)

Plan Your Approach

One of the first—and biggest—questions you will face as you begin

your cloud migration is whether you will take a bottom-up or

top-down approach.

Top-down is when you make decisions at the top of the organization

—at the executive level, typically You involve the CIO and his or herorganization, and IT leads the effort

Bottom up is when the impetus, the ideas, the creativity, and eventhe hands-on work happen in the business units The people whohave specific business or implementation needs that can be solvedwith cloud applications drive the migration

In the perfect world, of course, the business users and IT and seniormanagement are all synchronized

Plan Your Approach | 15

Unfortunately, it’s not always that way Says Long View Systems’ Bell,

“It’s the classic Hatfield-and-McCoy situation Cats and dogs fight‐ing IT guys are criticized by the business because they either can’tdeliver something or they can’t deliver it fast enough And the busi‐ness guys are sitting there with plans that they have to meet, dead‐lines, product launches, revenue targets, and profitability targets.They’re trying to get things to market and online as quickly as possi‐ble.”

The bottom line: if a cloud strategy is not built collaboratively fromthe ground up with buy-in from both engineers and the CIO’s office,and has the corporate buy-in and the corporate support, it’s notlikely to deliver the results that everybody’s trying to get out of it Itmust include both

If you try to force a top-down approach on your organization, withconstraints imposed centrally that the engineers disagree with, thebusiness becomes frustrated, IT gets frustrated, and this is whereshadow IT begins to be a problem Gartner estimates that shadow IT

is 30 to 40 percent of IT spending in large enterprises, and EverestGroup goes even further, finding it comprises 50 percent or more.Jordan Hager, senior director of IT operations and systems architec‐ture, at Q2, a maker of digital banking platforms and solutions forbanks and credit unions based in Austin, Texas, experiences shadow

IT firsthand He says that today his company is on multiple clouds:GCP and AWS, and also Microsoft Azure

“If you look at it in terms of workload distribution, you’d probablyconsider it to be less than five percent of all workloads are in publiccloud, but it’s spread across three different clouds,” says Hager “Thatwas not by design but rather virtue of acquisition and developersgetting frustrated with waiting on IT, so they went and spun instan‐ces up so they could learn on their own.”

“The philosophy was, ‘the beauty of the cloud is that if I have acredit card I can go and spin up a cloud service and I’m off and run‐ning,’” says Hager He doesn’t see a fragmented approach like this asbeing an advantage to any business “I think we would absolutelylove to be in one cloud so we don’t have to train employees on how

to support multiple clouds and would also reap economies of scalethrough consolidation and vendor partnerships,” he says

“Our core competency is hosting our online banking applicationand not necessarily hosting a number of back-office applications,”says Hager “If we would have to recover from a disaster or sometype of large outage, we wanted to focus on our core business, not

on worrying about getting an accounts payable system back online.”Again, there are experts out there who specialize in such things, saysHager “So, what if you train someone to get good at it—they leave

to work elsewhere and you’re stuck retraining someone else for atask that isn’t that relevant to your business’s core strategy.”

For example, Q2 is evaluating the possibility of using Apache Kafka

as a messaging bus Says Hager, “We don’t want to have to run Kafka

in our private datacenters because to set it up, to make sure it’smonitored properly, configured to be highly available, and sizedappropriately are really critical things We’d much rather leverageKafka as a service where somebody manages the operational tasksbehind the scenes.”

Hager admits that the IT group in charge of the firm’s private data‐centers will get requests for something from a business unit “Andwhen we say, ‘It’s going to be a couple of weeks,’ they say, ‘I don’thave two weeks, can we just spin this up in AWS?’”

Although management at Q2 knows it could go faster and be moreagile if it went 100 percent cloud, it is also a financial services com‐pany that has banks and credit unions as customers, and needs toremain mindful of the compliance requirements that go along withservicing them

“It’s not that we think that cloud is less secure, because we believethey’re far more secure,” says Hager “The investments made in secu‐rity by cloud providers surpass the investments we could afford tomake in a given year And we definitely realize and understand thebenefits of agility in a public cloud But we have contractual obliga‐tions that our cloud is not only a secure cloud, but a compliantcloud Data governance is a concern and our customers depend on

us to be mindful of where their data is hosted.”

Hager hopes that in five years, everything will be in the cloud “Iwould surely hope so I think we’d be disappointed if it weren’t,” hesays

Scott Pelletier, CTO at Lewan Technology, a provider of managed ITservices, printer and copier management, and business technology

Plan Your Approach | 17

solutions based in Denver, Colorado, says that in his firm’s engage‐ments, they always involve IT “After all, IT is still going to beresponsible to some degree, because the connectivity and availabilityand security better work—and the business will let you know if itdoesn’t, even if you weren’t involved in the selection or implementa‐tion process,” he says.

Whenever Orange Business System’s Tuttle is approached by busi‐ness units that are attempting to move to the cloud on their own,without IT, he “rectifies that situation immediately.”

“Certainly, we’ve had customers engage with us from business units

or application development teams without involvement of IT, butthat strategy or that approach brings problems,” he says “We have

no desire to become a shadow IT provider.”

If you aren’t giving IT the governance role that’s paramount toensuring that the cloud initiative meets the compliance, security,and other governance functions and requirements of the business,

“you’re only asking for trouble,” Tuttle says

The Seven-Step Migration Plan

Up until now, we’ve discussed key takeaways in planning yourapproach to cloud migration Let’s now dig into the seven steps forimplementing that plan and ensuring a successful migration to thecloud

This sequence is based on our own experiences as well as observingwhat LogicMonitor customers have experienced in their cloudmigrations

These are the steps:

Step 1: Identify desired outcomes for moving to the cloud.

Before you can hope to succeed at something, you need a goal.What is it that you are trying to achieve? Be as specific as possi‐ble

Step 2: Classify candidates for the cloud.

You need to decide which applications or workloads are the bestcandidates for the cloud Which migrations will help you meetyour stated outcomes from Step 1?

Step 3: Define deployment model criteria.

What’s the best type of cloud for each workload? What is bestsuited for IaaS? PaaS? SaaS? Private cloud? Figure it out now,before the move, to avoid costly mistakes

Step 4: Devise an iterative, agile process for transformation.

Now it’s time to look internally How can you organize yourteams so that they effectively mirror Agile software develop‐ment methodologies during the migration? So that they bothfail fast and learn fast?

Step 5: Get buy-in to the plan.

This is where your top-down or bottom-up strategy has toprove that you’ve got the support you need throughout theorganization for a successful migration

Step 6: Start simply and prioritize learning over Return on Investment (ROI).

You’ll hear advice to “go for the project with the biggest bang forthe buck,” or the highest ROI No Pick the project that is rela‐tively risk-free, and, most important, from which you’ll learnthe most

Step 7: Rinse and repeat.

Success breeds success After you’ve triumphed with one work‐load or application, go onto the next And the next

Step 1: Identify Desired Outcomes for Moving to the Cloud

In this all-important first step, you need to identify successful out‐comes and associated business goals and impacts for your organiza‐tion In short: pinpoint how your business hopes to benefit from thecloud Be specific! Success can be defined as simply freeing up scarceprivate datacenter space for strategic applications, or it might be toget customer-facing applications to market faster to beat a competi‐tor

One place to begin is to determine which outcomes will have thebiggest strategic impact for your enterprise

“If you’re doing this to save money, stop now,” says Pelletier “Thecloud providers want to make money, too, so they’re not giving awaythe infrastructure or the management of it, that’s for sure I’m not

The Seven-Step Migration Plan | 19

saying there aren’t other advantages like flexibility, time to market,but pure-play cost savings usually isn’t one of the main reasons youmove to a cloud solution.”

When Hager’s firm began migrating applications to the cloud—mostly to SaaS providers—it did so to achieve what it consideredmore of a modern corporate IT staffing model, staffed with businessanalysts and business intelligence professionals who manage vendorrelationships and specialize in data extraction or Extract, Transform,and Load (ETL) processes from SaaS-based back office executions.Jordan says, “We no longer manage any of our corporate IT services,print servers, or phones They’re all SaaS-based applications Wedecided to let the experts handle that for us,” says Hager

What was the desired outcome of moving to the cloud for Hager’sfirm? The company simply didn’t feel it needed to excel at writingand supporting basic business applications

“Our core competency is hosting our online banking applicationand not necessarily hosting a bunch of back-office applications,” saysJordan “If we would have to recover from a disaster or some type oflarge scale outage, we wanted to focus on our business, not on wor‐rying about getting QuickBooks back online.”

Like with many firms, Q2 wanted its move to the cloud to make theshift from CapEx to OpEx “When it’s in a private datacenter andyou own it, it’s a capital expense and it’s a depreciated asset,” saysHager

When it’s in the cloud and it’s a subscription, it’s an OpEx and “itjust hits you differently,” he says “It affects the books differently As

a publicly traded company, that’s a major consideration as we try tomeet our financial goals.”

Step 2: Classify Candidates for the Cloud

The next step is identifying which workloads are best moved to thecloud—either existing or planned applications You need to classifythem using eight criteria:

• Architecture

• Security

• Availability