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Should be used on covers or 1-2 page designsThe human storybehind yourcloud migration

Re-imagine how.

The human story behind your cloud migration | Introduction

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Some organisations adopt a cloud-first policy for individual business units, while others extend their migration to the cloud across their entire organisation. The approach chosen depends on your business goals, industry, and level of inhouse experience and expertise.

Whichever path you choose there will always be challenges, and the complexity of migrations vary depending on your current architecture and licensing arrangements, as well as the organisation itself.

If you’re reading this you’ve probably madethe decision to migrate some, or even themajority, of your application workloads to public cloud; possibly with the aim of

retiring an entire data centre. Most likely, you already understand the strategic benefits cloud will bring to your business.

A cloud migration programme could help you move to the cloud and start realising the benefits more quickly. It could also reduce the risk of moving individual workloads to the cloud by allowing you to strategically plan and execute your cloud transformation in a methodical way; using a robust set of tools to automate and accelerate your cloud strategy, with futuregrowth in mind.

Driving this change is the fact that fourfifths of global IT budgets are dedicated to maintenance; and nearly a third of IT time is spent on administrative tasks.

Accelerate your cloud migration

The human story behind your cloud migration | Introduction

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Naturally, organisations are finding the business efficiencies and cost savings of operating in the cloud increasingly attractive, with fewer resource demands on IT and more predictable operations through automation and a more agile infrastructure.

While migrating to the cloud changes theway businesses operate, it also impacts the individuals and teams across your organisation.

In this guide we look at the culture change that cloud will bring to your business. We will also explore how to help your technical and business staff prepare for migration, and, ultimately, how to plan and execute a successful cloud migration programme that equips your organisation for future growth.

62%

87%

of organisations are currently using the cloud as a platform for modernising their IT environments

of organisations plan to integrate their on-premises data centre with the public cloud1

1 Migration to Microsoft Azure - Transforming the Datacenter.

The human story behind your cloud migration | 7 steps

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Step 1: Ready for culture change?

Step 2: Building a vision for cloud migration

Step 3: Centre of Excellence – the powerhouse of change

Step 4: Sharing success

Step 5: Planning for the future

Step 6: Managing expectations

Step 7: Successful migration

Seven steps to accelerate your cloud migration

The human story behind your cloud migration | Step 1

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A cloud migration involves shifting multiple workloads, or a whole portfolio of business applications, from one infrastructure to another. A completed cloud migration can enable you to close an entire data centre by moving all of its databases and applications to cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Cloud migration can understandably bring significant culture change to an IT organisation and the enterprise, as cloud technologies and the new ways of working they demand introduce greater agility to the business.

At the infrastructure level, cloud platforms significantly reduce lead times for commissioning equipment, compared with traditional hosting. You can ‘spin up’ environments rapidly using commands or scripts.

The cloud can help accelerate your digital transformation, enabling new business models to be explored and creating new sources of value. It brings greater innovation and agility, and offers almost unlimited scalability.

Step 1. Ready for culture change?

“True digital transformation involves turning an organisation’s culture upside down.” 2

2 TechMarketView - Infrastructure Services Market Trends & Forecasts (2017-2020)


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Whilst cloud migration is a key step on the road to business transformation, it can challenge the mindset in some organisations, particularly if they are used to traditional on-premise IT systems. This is where cloud advocates can bring reassurance and help share the cloud vision. The cloud migration will have an impact on functions other than IT, and all departments should be aligned to the strategy.

One major factor that will help to allay any concerns across the organisation is a thorough and comprehensive migration programme. KCOM uses a four-phase migration programme that covers Viability Assessment, Planning and Readiness through to Migration Execution and Optimisation. A robust programme like this will ensure your team can have confidence and peace of mind, and benefit from KCOM’s cloud migration experience and best practices.

Step 2. Building a vision for cloud migration

“A cloud migration provides an ideal opportunity for the business to automate mundane processes and bring their IT team’s skills up-to-date. It also frees up capacity for them to carry out more interesting higher value work that could more directly impact your customers.”

Graham Masterson,Head of Propositions, KCOM Enterprise


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Preparation and education are the keys to a successful migration programme. This starts with building a Cloud Centre of Excellence that includes stakeholders from across the business as well as technical staff.

The Cloud Centre of Excellence accelerates organisational learning and change. Your Centre of Excellence should act as a self-improving team, with everyone continually learning through regular retrospectives. That way, each workload migration becomes more successful than the previous one.

Step 3. Centre of Excellence –the powerhouse of change

“The customer brings the knowledge of their environment and current ways of working. A partner like KCOM adds to this their in-depth cloud expertise, experience and best practices. The close collaboration between the two allows you to build out from the core of the partner’s expertise.”

Graham Masterson, Head of Propositions, KCOM Enterprise


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Step 4. Sharing success

Throughout the migration process, it’s vital to maintain good communication between the Centre of Excellence and your wider business and IT communities. Cloud migration can potentially bring a lot of change, and communicating plans and highlighting success will greatly assist the process.

By understanding the desired outcomes from the migration - both tangible and intangible - and sharing them across the organisation, you will enable cross-functional alignment. This should also prevent individual disciplines “going native” and building their own systems that are technically excellent but not strategically aligned.

As for the impact on day-to-day operations, you can minimise disruptions by starting off with simpler workload migrations while

you complete an analysis of your portfolio in parallel. This will help you develop a prioritised plan to gradually migrate more complex workloads as you free up resource capacity and build your expertise over time. Such an approach will allow you to realise value faster, providing positive reinforcement to the business and helping align the wider organisation behind the transformation plans.

“Get a handle on what you already use and how you’re using it. You can’t play a role in the cloud economy until you gain this understanding.” 3

3 Forrester - Cloud PowersThe New Connected Economy


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On the subject of innovation, the process of developing a prioritised migration plan can help to encourage your developers and business managers to think of new, smarter, more competitive ways of working. Plus, it will facilitate the development of new applications and services that willachieve these goals.

Furthermore, choosing a migration approach, and championing a cloud-first policy will also avoid the need to make the case for cloud for each individual project.

Planning for the future is something you can also build out from your Centre of Excellence. By establishing good relationships with cloud service providers who maintain their own partner ecosystems you will be able to more easily investigate the potential benefits of, for example, the Internet of Things, analytics and machine learning.

The right partners will work with you to understand your unique business requirements and advise on the ways you can leverage the cloud to open up new opportunities for your business. The cloud enables you to do things you may previously have thought were impossible.

Step 5. Planning for the future


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Migration projects can be complex, and you need to be agile to successfully handle any unpredictable elements that arise during the project.

The most common misconceptions about migrating workloads to the cloud are that all workloads are equal, and that everything can be done with the same tooling.

However, things can sometimes get complicated once you get further into the Viability Assessment. Some workloads may require more sophisticated tools to fully understand all their dependencies at the application, data and network level. Or you might find it’s not viable to move certain workloads, or that they require more detailed planning and proof-of-concept work.

Your team might find they have to commission migrations workload-by-workload, or by groups of workloads, making an individual business case for each one, including its resource impact and all associated risk.

Step 6. Managing expectations


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Consequently, you might decide, further down the line, that you can’t find a change window big enough to move the applications you thought were going to be easy to move. Or, the database might be too big, and it’s potentially going to cost more in the cloud; or it resides on a mainframe that is not supported in the cloud. In all these cases, the team will have to adjust, regroup and change tack.

A risk assessment at the beginning will help with these issues, but you’re always going to uncover more as the programme develops, particularly with large data centres. It means you have to be flexible as things come up, and help your stakeholders to see the wider benefits of your cloud migration. These include cost effective scalability for workload peaks, modernisation of the skills of the workforce, and the flexibility cloud brings to IT and the business, as well as the richer platform innovation.

60%of all enterprises will have fully articulated an organisation-widedigital transformation platform strategy by 2020. 4

4 IDC FutureScape - Worldwide IT Industry 2018 Predictions


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Step 7. Successful migration

So, how can your teams know that cloud migration to the cloud has been successful?

The first thing is to clearly set out at the beginning what your objectives are. For some organisations, this might mean closing a data centre or transitioning a portfolio of applications to the cloud. For others, success could look like introducing IoT capabilities to the organisation.

One of the advantages cloud technology has over traditional IT infrastructure is its ability to speed up the process of transformation through technologies such as virtualisation and containerisation. Therefore, the benefits of migrating your first workload can often be seen in a matter of months. It’s worth celebrating the early wins as this will encourage the team to move forward with renewed confidence.

Then, once in the cloud, you can tune your workloads, and refactor them further so they can scale up and down dynamically. This will help reduce the cost-base of individual workloads meaning the business sees greater value from them.

“Companies must re-architect operations around large-scale digital innovation networks, in effect becoming a new corporate species. If you’re not in the cloud, you’re isolated from innovation.”Frank Gens,Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst at IDC

The human story behind your cloud migration | Partnering for migration success

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The business and technology benefits of migration to the cloud are intrinsically linked with human factors. That’s why it’s essential to prepare your organisation from the beginning, and build a Centre of Excellence with cross-functional and senior representation, underpinned by the support of a strong partner.

The success of your cloud migration will depend on your teams working closely together, both within the IT department and also across the whole organisation. They should buy into and invest in the vision, learn together and share their struggles, ideas and initiatives on a day-to-day basis.

With a structured path, a sound security and governance framework, and the flexibility to meet tomorrow’s challenges, you can be sure that your migration journey is business-aligned and best suited for your needs. This, along with a clear strategy and roadmap, will help you avoid common pitfalls, and ready your organisation for future growth.

We are here to provide experienced guidance to simplify the complexities of application transformation and help you more quickly realise the benefits of moving workloads to the cloud.

Partnering for migration success

The human story behind your cloud migration | Partnering for migration success

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“Invest in and partner for next-generation skills. You should upskill your existing staff where it makes sense and hire or partner to fill gaps.

Your cloud ecosystem requires partnering with third-party sources of talent.” 5

5 Forrester - Cloud Powers The New Connected Economy

Get in touch: www.kcom.com/contact-us Call: 0800 138 3525Tweet: @KCOMbusinessLinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/kcom/

Re-imagine how.

www.kcom.com

By combining ingenuity, agility and integrity, KCOM goes beyond the mandate: shaping solutions to meet the demands of emerging and future business challenges. KCOM believes that the greatest opportunities lie in the unknown. That there is always an alternative, smarter way to achieve business goals. To re-imagine how.

We help organisations migrate to the cloud by exploring the knowns, and discovering the unknowns, on the path to the cloud. Our team of cloud experts have the ingenuity to deep-dive into an IT estate and assess its cloud readiness and create a structured plan for migration.

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