The Essential Guide to Modernising and Migrating to the Cloud
The cloud offers huge benefits to SMEs. Here’s what you need to know.
At home, you use cloud-based apps all the time.
You’ve got Google Maps to get you places. Netflix to satisfy your viewing habits, Spotify for music, Zoom for video calls and Alexa… She’s just generally helpful. They make your life easier and more enjoyable.
The same could be true for work, but where do you start?
There are the ageing servers in the office. They’re becoming harder to maintain and they’re struggling to cope with the demands of your business. The legacy database you’ve always used isn’t entirely fit for purpose. It’s expensive to licence too. And maybe your applications are in data silos. They’re not talking to each other and processes are clunky. Automation would make things so much more efficient, both in time and money.
You want to modernise your business but there is a lot to consider. You don’t want to get it wrong and risk costly mistakes. The good news is you don’t have to do it on your own.
Cloud Construct is here to help.
Cloud computing is on-demand access to IT and computing resources via the internet with pay as you go prices. Resources include physical and virtual servers, applications, data storage, development tools and networking capabilities built with the highest standards for privacy and data security.
What are the main benefits of Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing has the potential to transform your business. Here are just some of the benefits:
1. Swap capital expenses (CapEx) for operating expenses (OpEx)
On-premises data centres require you to invest thousands of pounds up front in physical servers and hardware before you use them. You need to choose your hardware and wait for it. Then you have to renew them every three years for optimal performance.
With cloud computing you pay for computing resources that you use. You don’t have to make any upfront investments in hardware (or risk making the wrong investment). Flexible payment options with cloud providers like AWS help you to optimise costs. If you’re unsure of usage to begin with, you could pay on demand until you determine your requirements. When you know your usage, you can switch to a one or three year saving plan which will allow for predictable budgeted monthly costs.
Other payment plans offer further savings depending on usage e.g. you could save up to 80% by using spot instance pricing for non-mission critical workloads.
2. Focus on the activity that will make you money
Evaluating your systems and standard operating processes (SOPs) is part of defining your business case. It’s a great opportunity to assess what is useful and working well for your organisation, and what is no longer fit for purpose. Closely examine your systems and the programmes you are (and not) using.
- Are you investing in a bells-and-whistles database, but only actually using the basic features?
- Is your business seasonal? Do you experience spikes in traffic, CPU usage and/or memory usage at certain times of the year?
- What are the most common, repetitive and time consuming tasks?
- Who does these tasks? Could their time be put to better use?
- What are your current software licences? Are they transferable to the cloud? When are they up for renewal?
- What are your application requirements i.e. service level agreements (SLAs), disaster recovery, security and access requirements?
3. Benefit from massive economies of scale
AWS and other cloud providers have data centres and millions of customers all over the world. They are investing in new technology all the time. As a result, they have the purchasing power which SMEs can never achieve on their own. You benefit from lower pay-as-you-go prices and access to technology which was previously the luxury of enterprises with huge budgets.
4. Stop guessing capacity
You’ve evaluated your systems and processes and you’ve defined your business case for cloud migration. Now it’s time to choose a migration strategy. Depending on your business, it’s likely (and recommended) you’ll use a combination of the “6Rs of Migration”.
5. Easy access to innovation
AWS provides cutting edge technology along with hundreds, if not thousands, of tools and resources. This makes it easier and quicker for developers like us to experiment, innovate and find better ways to help SMEs streamline their processes and automate common, repetitive and time-consuming tasks.
6. Go global in minutes
It’s easier than ever to access global markets.
In the past you would have to open a dedicated office and data centre. It was a drawn out, complicated and costly process. Now, you can deploy applications to customers around the world quickly through AWS. You could host your applications in the region where your customers are based, rather than where you operate. This would result in low latency (i.e. minimal time delay in computer processing) and a better user experience.
Your Cloud Migration Plan
The benefits are clearly impressive. However, you need to have a plan to fully maximise the benefits of cloud computing in your business and minimise the risk of potential mistakes and disruption. Here’s what we recommend:
1. Define your business case for cloud migration
The business case has to start with your business objectives. Why do you want to move to the cloud? What do you want to achieve?
A strong and clearly defined business case will help you to gather support from across the business. It also helps you to prioritise your activity and determine your best migration strategy.
Where is your business now? Have a clear understanding of your current costs and business processes now, so you can weigh them up against projected costs in the cloud.
Things to consider include:
- Cost of maintaining your on-premises data centre
- IT equipment lease and associated costs
- Current server capacity
2. Analyse and evaluate your business systems
There are a lot of costs and considerations when your servers and IT equipment are on premises.
You need to make sure they are properly maintained. Your overheads increase as energy prices rise – and this can be substantial when you’re running servers 24/7. They need to be at the right temperature. They take up physical space. You’re responsible for the physical and network security of the servers. You need to plan for disaster recovery (fire loss, off premises storage, backups etc).
Cloud computing allows you to focus on your core business activities and customers as your cloud provider takes care of maintaining and running the data centres.
3. Gather support
Migration to the cloud isn’t just an IT issue. It impacts the whole organisation: HR, governance and compliance, operations, marketing and finance. It’s important to communicate the benefits and process to key stakeholders and gain their support to make the migration process as smooth as possible.
4. Choose you migration strategy
You’ve evaluated your systems and processes and you’ve defined your business case for cloud migration. Now it’s time to choose a migration strategy. Depending on your business, it’s likely (and recommended) you’ll use a combination of the “6Rs of Migration”.
STRATEGY #1
Repurchasing
Repurchasing (or replacing) refers to when a legacy application is replaced by a Saas (Software as a Service) solution or cloud-based version e.g. moving a CRM to Hubspot or Salesforce.com, an HR system to Workday, or using an accountancy SaaS like Xero or Quickbooks.
SaaS platforms and tools open up tremendous opportunities to streamline your business workflows, reduce admin and improve data accuracy when they share data with other applications via API. For example, HoneyBook,a client management tool for small businesses, can be integrated with Quickbooks so payments are automatically synced.
If your business systems and processes are unique and a suitable solution does not exist, we could build one for you. Cloud Construct builds and develops bespoke cloud apps.
STRATEGY #2
Rehosting (aka “Lift and shift”)
A “lift and shift” cloud migration model involves moving apps and operations from your on-premises servers to the cloud without making any changes (at least not at the start). It’s basically a copy and paste approach. Lift and shift is the fastest and easiest way to get a workload on to the cloud and, if you’re only considering pure migration costs, it’s the cheapest migration model. Some businesses have reported 40% savings just by rehosting (AWS).
However, the initial cost savings may be lost or not fully realised if you don’t optimise your workloads for the cloud later on. You may also miss out on cloud native benefits like stability and automated performance management.
STRATEGY #3
Replatforming (aka “lift, tinker and shift”)
A replatforming strategy involves making a few cloud optimisations as part of the migration. You’re not touching any code and no new development efforts are involved. Instead, you’re replacing parts of your IT system with managed services.
When you replatform you can benefit from significant performance improvements, improved scalability (it can grow as you grow) and reliability, as well as a reduction in management efforts and associated time costs.
Replatforming is common in database hosting e.g. Migrating your existing MySQL database to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) MySQL without any changes.
STRATEGY #4
Refactoring / Re-architecting
Refactoring is the most complex migration strategy but offers the most long-term benefits. Chunks of code in applications and software are modified or re-architected so that they are better suited to the cloud environment.
The goal of refactoring is to improve performance, agility, quality and maintainability. You’ll be able to scale resources as needed and adapt rapidly to customer requirements by adding new features or modifying existing functionality.
Refactored applications will be more resilient too, as refactoring involves decoupling application components. When components are closely coupled, if one component fails, other components fail so the application stops working.
Loose coupling helps to maintain the application’s availability. If one component fails, the other components can keep communicating with each other as they are operating as a microservice.
STRATEGY #5
Retire
When you go through your business processes systems, you may identify hardware, assets and services that aren’t needed any more. This is the perfect opportunity to “retire” and archive them. It could mean significant cost savings and means that you can focus on services that are useful and have immediate business value.
STRATEGY #6
Retain
There are some circumstances when a hybrid cloud migration approach is necessary and you retain parts of your IT portfolio on-premises. This could be true if you are regulated or are required to store or run some aspects of your services or application on-premises for compliance purposes.
You may also feel more comfortable keeping some of your apps on-premises, and other apps which are coming towards the end of their “life” and it’s not worth migrating them.
5. Speak to an expert to guide you through it
The benefits of the cloud are huge but there’s no “one size fits all” policy to modernisation and cloud migration.
Every business is different. Cloud migration can be done in stages – you don’t have to migrate everything all at once. Some parts of your business may not be suitable for the cloud, maybe a hybrid cloud/on premises policy could better suit your business.
Cloud Construct is here to help you to adopt, grow and thrive in the cloud, when you are ready and with an approach that’s right for you.
