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AdvantageJul 31, 2019 12:00:00 AM2 min read

The Move to Cloud: Why Not 'Lift-and-Shift'?

Your Company is moving to the cloud… good for you. You and your colleagues probably can’t wait to recognize the benefits that the move can bring. But what can you do to improve your prospects for doing just that?

Most cloud service providers will base their proposals for your business on the scope and scale of your current infrastructure. That sounds logical enough, but at Advantage, we recommend a different approach… more on that later.

Adopting the cloud should be an enabler to becoming a more agile organization. That is the #1 benefit that organizations that have made this journey have experienced. Everything that depends on IT becomes easier, faster, and cheaper, which accelerates the entire business. But if your cloud footprint looks exactly like your on-premises configuration, how likely is it that you’ll receive all the benefits? Your current infrastructure is probably over-provisioned, which makes sense because your current operating model is characterized by long lead times to accomplish most activities. If you “lift-and-shift” your current workloads, the move seems straightforward enough and certainly manageable, but you’ll be paying for more than you need, and you’ll have more resources to manage… the antithesis of the cloud model.

It’s natural enough to ask the question ‘should we move what we have and transform from there, or transform our operation in preparation for migrating to exploit the benefits more rapidly?’  We recommend undertaking the transformation to leverage the capabilities and benefits up front.

Take advantage of the cloud initiative to transform your operation into being as agile as the business requires or to which it aspires. You’ll have the ability to provision resources practically when needed (and release them when they are not), have access to data and capabilities from anywhere and any device, build elasticity into applications, have accurate measurement of consumption and costs, and put your business on a much more favorable cost trajectory.

Replicating your current on-prem setup seems simpler, yet leaves you exactly where you don’t want to be. Our CloudAdvantage approach kicks off with consideration of your business drivers to inform which workloads in the cloud will have the greatest business benefit. We help prioritize a roadmap for subsequent workloads, facilitate the selection of the right cloud services provider for you, and coordinate between your team and the cloud provider’s to migrate applications with a balanced view of managing risk while expediting the move.

Moving your business to the cloud is a key step in making your business digital, soon becoming table stakes in many industries. You don’t want to be caught in the trap of ‘Production Inertia’ after you have placed your business at a disadvantage by taking the apparently simpler approach.