By Ajay Shukla, Director, Cloud Service Solutions
Cloud computing has liberated countless organizations from the constraints of traditional on-premises data centers by enabling them to deploy software services more quickly, securely and effectively.
It’s a leading factor for artificial intelligence (AI) investments, enabling AI use cases to flourish and extracting even more value from cloud capabilities. In fact, according to a search – 2023 McKinsey report, generative AI can add 75 to 110 percentage points of incremental return on investment (ROI) to cloud programs.
However, cloud migration is a daunting task for many organizations and its full potential has yet to be realized.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office identified four challenges inhibiting federal agency cloud migration: ensuring cybersecurity, procuring cloud services, maintaining a skilled workforce and tracking costs and savings.
Many enterprises who want to consolidate or shut down their Data Centers by migrating to the public cloud face a challenge from legacy applications and data services that are not ready for cloud. The most common challenges of cloud migrations are summarized below.
- Post- migration cloud costs exceeding expectation.
- Cultural resistance and inability to achieve sustainable business benefits.
- Difficulty in securing cloud environments and cloud applications due to unique nature of software defined infrastructure and ephemeral resources in cloud.
- Difficulty in achieving continuous Compliance ATO (Authority to Operate) in regulated environments.
- Excessive time and effort required to re-factor legacy applications and to transform traditional on-prem data services.
DMI with extensive expertise and experience in supporting organizations in both public sector and private commercial sector markets on the full life cycle of Cloud Adoption can help its customers’ in handing these challenges very efficiently.
Prioritizing a holistic organizational readiness amid technological innovation
Cloud migration is only as valuable as an organization’s ability to successfully deploy and operate the new technology. In addition to technical roadblocks, challenges often arise due to insufficient expertise, cultural resistance, ineffective processes, and unexpected costs.
Organizations will thrive with a holistic approach that accounts for the people, culture, and appropriate service management processes at every step of the cloud migration lifecycle.
A key enabler for successful cloud migration is organizational change management (OCM), a strategic approach to helping companies adapt amid significant transitions. OCM methodologies should provide effective change communication, stakeholder collaboration, workforce education and reskilling, and business process engineering. Enabling employees with right knowledge and timely support is fundamental to building trust and minimizing frictions in the change.
Another critical factor to consider is cloud economics. Organizations need to factor in cloud cost management and return-on-investment management at every step of cloud adoption. Cloud FinOps offers a practical framework to maximize the strategic business value of cloud adoption. Applying a FinOps framework throughout cloud adoption lifecycle drives enterprises to identify the best service architecture, achieve total visibility and governance, right size cloud resources, and optimize costs.
Cloud Migration+ Key Features and Benefits
We’re proud to introduce DMI Cloud Migration+, a proven cloud migration service solution curated from our extensive, cross-sector customer support experiences. Cloud Migration+ consists of our highly effective OCM and FinOps methodologies, and advanced technology solutions leading to rapid value realization.
Key technical features in our Cloud Migration+ solution include:
- Non-disruptive migration of large data services — We leverage data virtualization technologies to reduce risks while maintaining application availability and data integrity.
- Compliance as Code (CaC) — Our CaC solution codifies the security controls, operation processes, and security documentation in a DevSecOps construct and implements the principles of modularity, inheritance, and zero trust. It shortens security ATO process for federal agencies.
- AI-powered code analysis and code generation — Our solution analyzes code base in legacy applications, extracting business logics and process flows implemented in the application code. It then provides recommendations on new architecture designs and generates new cloud native applications automatically with human developers guidance.
- Zero Trust Security for the Cloud — Our solution deploys robust cloud securities controls following Zero Trust Security principles to protect workloads, applications, and data. Our solution provides Advanced and Optimal level maturity as defined in the CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model 2.0.
- Large-scale Rapid cloud migration with hyper-automation — Intelligent automation capabilities are built-in in each of our migration phases: Discover & Assess, Plan, Prepare, Build & Test, Security ATO, Migrate, Operate & Optimize. It accelerates and scales up the entire cycle of cloud migration.
Whether your organization wants to migrate applications from on-prem to the cloud or from cloud to cloud and no matter what business objectives your organization wants to achieve through the cloud migration, DMI can support your needs wherever you are on your cloud journey. Our diverse experience working with both public and private sector institutions of all sizes provide proven technical and operational solutions, as well as project management practices to ensures we can meet the needs of any customers.
To learn more, check out our fact sheet about Cloud Migration+ – This link will open a PDF document.
