How to achieve multicloud flexibility and control – starting with migration

Flexibility is a huge incentive for enterprise migrations to the cloud, especially when you can pick and choose from multiple cloud providers for different workloads and business needs. But anyone who’s been through a migration or two knows how quickly bullish expectations can collide with unexpected cloud migration and management realities. Migrations themselves are often full of surprises. Moreover, once a workload is in the cloud, control is just as important as flexibility— and it also looks different from on-premises solutions. And multicloud approaches add a whole other set of management considerations and variables.

With all that complexity, what’s the likelihood of a misstep?

Consider that 79% of respondents to an Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) survey have repatriated cloud workloads due to unexpected challenges or costs. How can you avoid common mistakes and make sure that you’re getting maximum cloud flexibility and control for your critical workloads? 

Initially, it’s important to focus on three things:

• Correct target environment setup. Today’s public clouds offer myriad architectural options, which is great from a flexibility standpoint. But when teams don’t fully understand the target environment, setup missteps can cause cascading challenges that doom projects.
• Adequate planning. Close attention to detail is critical to successful cloud migrations. Even cloud- native companies that are confident in their abilities can get tripped up by brittle, outdated, or especially complex environments. Misunderstandings about the composition of environments, which are common, also lead to all kinds of issues. One company asking for help with a failed migration had misunderstood the source environment after a long-time team member with key knowledge had moved on. They thought it was a single SMB server hosted on Isilon, but it turned out to be a DNS environment with 23 distinct SMB servers. Each environment requires different approaches, tools, and timeframes for a migration.
• The right skill-sets. Administrators who are responsible for keeping critical workloads running and stable don’t necessarily have the skills needed to set up a new cloud environment and plan and execute a migration. Before starting, it’s important to be realistic about your team’s understanding of everything from proper security setup to dealing with latency to how to accurately predict and manage costs.

If you’re thinking that your team needs work in some or all these areas, you’re not alone. 93% of respondents to the ESG survey said that their organization’s cloud migration processes need to be improved.

Migration challenges aside, hybrid cloud environments are the wave of the future. So, what can you do to move away from complicated, costly cloud approaches that tie you to one or two key providers? To maximize cloud flexibility and control, you need to prioritize consolidation, automation, and optimization.

For a deep dive into this important topic, check out the Consolidate, Automate, Optimize: how to Achieve Multi-Cloud Flexibility webcast, featuring ESG and NetApp hybrid cloud industry experts. The webcast covers:

• The current state of cloud adoption
• Cloud migration challenges and how to overcome them
• The changes that IT buyers are making to address the needs of multi-cloud
• What IT buyers should be looking for