A good Cloud transition starts with packing your suitcase smartly

Written by: Koen van Schijndel

A holiday isn’t a holiday without fussing with your suitcase. You bring too many long pants, too few shirts and you forget the world plug. You just take too much, which means you have to pay extra at Schiphol and your future souvenirs will probably have to be checked in separately. And when you arrive at your hotel at night, your pyjamas and toothbrush are at the bottom of all that chaos, and you have to get past the plethora of pants to be able to sleep. You have exactly this scenario if you don’t prepare a Cloud transition and pack random stuff for the crossing. Only this time, you’re not going back home.

Cloud transition

A Cloud transition is all about moving applications from your on-premises data center to the platform of a Cloud Service Provider (CSP). You do this to develop and scale new applications faster, as well as to save on IT management and data storage. After all, the Cloud offers many new possibilities and computing power: exactly what you want as a company with digital enterprise aspirations. But here it comes. A Cloud transition does not mean that you blindly transfer your applications to their new environment. You take a different approach to IT management and turn off some applications because you no longer need them. Therefore, to avoid hassles and high costs, it is useful to sweep through your application landscape and consider for each application what needs to be done before migrating.

Or in the suitcase metaphor: first think about what you will need at your holiday destination and pack your belongings based on that.

Heavily packed makes slow

In the long run, a Cloud transition usually provides more value and less pressure on your IT department. You can also cancel a number of contracts, for example with parties that until now provided server capacity, data storage and maintenance, and instead start paying according to usage. In the suitcase metaphor, you cancel your mortgage and start paying for the number of suitcases you check in. The more suitcases you bring, the more expensive your trip will be, but also the slower you will be. After all, any applications you take with you must be made cloud-ready and may interfere with employees’ work during their transfer. Therefore, Cloud’s benefits only apply if you travel lightly. For example, many applications are perfectly replaceable with SaaS products, and you can also turn off many applications. The more the Cloud Service Provider does for you in terms of management, monitoring and development, the more time and money you have left to spend on innovation. In fact, this is the great advantage of Cloud: you innovate faster because you spend less time on IT issues that are not critical to your success.

Don’t put your quick wins at the bottom of your suitcase

Once you’ve mapped out your application landscape (more on this in the next blog), it’s time to start the Cloud transition. Think back for a moment to the pyjamas at the bottom of the suitcase. That’s a simple piece of clothing, but you can’t get to it until you’ve unpacked everything else. No problem (you’re on holiday), but if you translate this situation to a Cloud transition, it means that you can’t quickly start relatively light but useful applications in the Cloud environment. These so-called quick wins should be moved first, because they can quickly go live and add immediate value. You avoid this problem by prioritising in advance. Which applications need to work immediately? And which applications provide the most cost savings in the short term? The answers to these questions will help you pack your “migration suitcase,” where the quick wins are also transitioned first.

Travel in style

Comparing a Cloud transition to going on holiday is going a bit far, but hopefully the suitcase metaphor has clarified some things. For example, thinking in advance about the benefit of your applications helps to migrate faster and at lower cost. It’s also how you end up with applications in their most ideal form: for example, in-house so your IT department can work with them, or as a SaaS product so you have time and budget for innovation. That way, not only will you travel more comfortably, but the way you travel will meet your final destination.