Business Decision – Why and what to move to the Public Cloud?

Migrating to AWS or Azure

Organizations have begun moving applications and workloads to public cloud at an increasing rate. According to Gartner, the worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) public cloud market grew 31% in 2016 to total $22.1 billion1. In 2016, Amazon AWS had the No. 1 market share of 44.2%, Microsoft Azure 7.1% of the market and Alibaba 3.0% of the market.

Organizations are relying on the public cloud for a successful digital transformation. Many organizations have established a cloud strategy and business plan for moving workloads and applications to public cloud infrastructure, but are still working to determine the migration plan to support that strategy. But not all workloads and applications may be suitable for public cloud infrastructure services.

According to ESG Research, 91% of organizations expect to have substantial on-premises infrastructure deployments for the next five years. Most, but not all, applications and workloads can be migrated to public cloud. But just because you can migrate workloads and applications to public cloud doesn’t mean you should. As indicated, most organizations will have hybrid IT environments for the foreseeable future.

3 Essential Steps for Migrating to AWS or Azure Public Cloud

Step 1: Take inventory

The first step in a migration to public cloud is understanding the applications you have, the on-premises infrastructure resources supporting them, and the workload interdependencies. The best way to accomplish this is by using a discovery tool that automates the discovery and dependency mapping process. A discovery tool should provide an accurate inventory of infrastructure that includes:

• Servers (physical and virtual, hypervisor, OS, CPU, RAM, disk)
• Software (+EOL), databases, web sites
• Network devices (switches, load balancers, etc.)
• Storage (devices, but also their logical partitioning)

Discovery tools will collect server specification information, server to storage relationships, performance data, and details about running processes and network connections. Use the learnings from the discovery tool to help establish a migration sequence, minimize downtime and assist in test plans.

Step 2: Evaluate applications

Not all applications and workloads are well suited for public cloud. When developing a migration plan, it is essential to evaluate the workloads and applications that are candidates for moving to the public cloud. The considerations must be measured against the goals of your cloud strategy and the potential business risk. The key is to examine all applications and workloads under a consistent framework – not on an ad hoc basis.

When assessing the readiness for running applications in the public cloud, all the options need to be considered – from retaining as is, to replacing.

Rehost

Redeploy an application to a cloud-based platform without modifying the application’s code. The reason for doing a lift and shift can be to quickly scale in order to meet a business need. Established applications that were not designed for efficient use of infrastructure will most likely cost more to run in a public cloud. Because of this, a simulated migration is recommended for rehosting applications to prevent cost surprises.

Refactor/Rearchitect

Refactoring/rearchitecting involves making modifications to the application, application framework or runtime environment. This can include making application code or configuration changes to attain some tangible benefit from moving to public cloud platform without making major changes to the core architecture of the applications.

For example, you may swap out a database server for a cloud service equivalent to reduce the amount of time you spend managing database instances. The goal is to get some optimization benefit from public cloud service with very little code change to the application.

Rebuild

For applications that you wrote, redesigning and rebuilding a cloud-native application on a provider’s PaaS may be worth the investment. This typically provides better performance and lower costs (if done correctly). This may be the right choice for applications that are business-critical, but not designed to take advantage of the services offered on a cloud platform. In addition, non x86-based applications, like mainframe and midrange applications that rely on operating systems other than Linux and Windows will need to be rewritten. This is the most expensive option, but the investment to rewrite an application may be worth it if looking to boost agility, reduce costs and improve business continuity.

Replace/Repurchase

For commercial, on-premises applications, replacement with a SaaS offering may be the best solution. Many vendors offer both SaaS and on-premises solutions now. And even if the preference is to run on-premises, many ISVs have upgraded their applications to better run on cloud platforms and it could be a matter of upgrading the application to a more current version.

Retain

Running applications on-premises is always an option. It may make good business sense to keep some applications on-premises. Lower costs and better security and compliance are strong considerations for doing so. Not every application benefits from a cloud platform. Applications that have static workloads with no agile demand, and that are running on stable systems, are good candidates to be retained on-premises.

The application evaluation phase also provides an opportunity to identify applications and workloads that are no longer needed or lack the business justification to warrant the ongoing cost to support them. This is a great time to rationalize your portfolio.

Step 3: Analyze cost

Migrating applications to public cloud platforms is a business decision that requires both financial and technical assessment. This is particularly important if the migration includes rehosted or refactored applications. If a preliminary assessment of the cost difference for running these applications on-premises vs. in a public cloud is not done, you will most likely get a big cost surprise later.

In a recent BMC survey, 40% of respondents stated they are unclear of their costs associated with cloud – even though lower cost was the primary driver (45%) for moving to public cloud.

Every IT organization should have a history of resource usage and workload patterns for their applications, along with the unit cost of infrastructure resources. Many organizations gather this information routinely and use it for chargeback or showback for IT infrastructure costs. If you do not have this information, you can still gain cost insights – they just won’t be as accurate. At a minimum, you need a unit cost for on-premises infrastructure resources and compute, storage and network resources for the workloads and applications you want to migrate. Otherwise you have no costs to compare.

The first step for determining cost of on-premises vs. public cloud costs is to identify the resources needed in public cloud. You can start by identifying the closest type of VM instance and configuration needed in public cloud. For AWS, this will be an EC2 instance and for Azure, a Windows VM. AWS has over 90 different types of VMs to choose from, and each type has multiple configurations from which to choose, and multiple locations or regions. Azure also has similar choices.

Once you have identified the compute resources, you must determine if you want to pay an on-demand price or a 40-60% discount price that you can get with one or three-year service commitments. AWS refers to these discounted VMs as Reserved Instances. If you have not yet selected a public cloud provider, you will want to compare costs across providers. Without having an automated tool to do this analysis for you, this effort can take weeks, depending on the number of applications and workloads you are analyzing.

There may be special storage, database or network resources that you need to identify and factor in as well. Once the analysis is completed, you should view it as a snapshot in time. IT environments are naturally dynamic, so costs will change over time. An ongoing cost management practice is essential to regulating operating and capital expense for a hybrid, multi-cloud environment.

Moving forward

Developing a migration plan takes time and a dedicated team. To streamline the effort and reduce time, you can use a solution like BMC Discovery to automate the discovery and dependency mapping work, and TrueSight Cloud Cost Control to automate the public cloud resource selection and pricing options evaluation. Once you are ready to begin migration, both AWS and Azure offer tools to help you move workloads and applications to their platforms.

Migration is just the first step of incorporating public cloud into your IT environment. To keep costs under control, you will need to establish a capacity management practice to ensure you are optimizing the use of public cloud and on-premises resources. And because of the change from capital expense to operating expense associated with this move, you will need to have an ongoing cost management practice to ensure that you adhere to both capital and operating budgets and maximize your IT infrastructure investment.

Source: https://www.bmc.com/blogs/3-essential-steps-for-migrating-to-aws-or-azure-public-cloud/

 

Strategize and plan workload migration to Public Cloud

Closer look at Cloud Migration

Organizations conviction in moving to the Public Cloud is getting stronger day by day. IT teams of all Enterprises today agree that cloud is becoming a key part of their IT Investments. But when it comes to the planning for the migration of the workloads from on-premise to cloud, unfortunately there is still a lot of confusion about what to move, how to move it and the best practices to follow to ensure smooth migration. A successful migration is possible only if there is a clear vision and plan for the migration defined.

Regardless of your current IT environment or your vision for migrating to the cloud, numerous strategies exist that can accommodate your cloud-migration approach. Fortunately, this range of options allows you to proceed with caution while making progress toward your ultimate objective.

Top Five Cloud Migration Strategies

1. Re-hosting

Sometimes referred to as “lift and shift,” re-hosting simply entails redeploying applications to a cloud-based hardware environment and making the appropriate changes to the application’s host configuration. This type of migration can provide a quick and easy cloud migration solution. There are trade-offs to this strategy, as the IaaS-based benefits of elasticity and scalability are not available with a re-hosting deployment.

However, the solution is made even more appealing by the availability of automated tools such as Amazon Web Services VM Import/Export. Still, some customers prefer to “learn by doing,” and opt to deploy the re-hosting process manually. In either case, once you have applications actually running in the cloud they tend to be easier to optimize and re-architect.

Re-hosting is particularly effective in a large-scale enterprise migration. Some organizations have realized a cost savings of as much as 30 percent, without having to implement any cloud-specific optimizations.

2. Re-platforming

This strategy entails running applications on the cloud provider’s infrastructure. You might make a few cloud-related optimizations to achieve some tangible benefit with relative ease, but you aren’t spending developer cycles to change an application’s core architecture.

Advantages of re-platforming include its “backward compatibility” that allows developers to reuse familiar resources, including legacy programming languages, development frameworks, and existing caches of an organization’s vital code.

An unfortunate downside to this strategy is the nascent state of the PaaS market, which doesn’t always provide some of the familiar capabilities offered to developers by existing platforms.

3. Repurchasing

This solution most often means discarding a legacy application or application platform, and deploying commercially available software delivered as a service. The solution reduces the need for a development team when requirements for a business function change quickly. The repurchasing option often manifests as a move to an SaaS platform such as Salesforce.com or Drupal. Disadvantages can include inconsistent naming conventions, interoperability issues, and vendor lock-in.

4. Refactoring / Re-architecting

This solution involves re-imagining how an application is architected and developed, typically using the cloud-native features of PaaS. This is usually driven by a strong business need to add features, scale, or performance that would otherwise be difficult to achieve in the application’s existing environment.

Unfortunately, this means the loss of legacy code and familiar development frameworks. On the flip side, it also means access to world-class developer’s tools available via the provider’s platform. Examples of productivity tools provided by PaaS providers include application templates and data models that can be customized, and developer communities that supply pre-built components.

The primary disadvantage to a PaaS arrangement is that the customer becomes extremely dependent on the provider. The fallout from a disengagement with the vendor over policies or pricing can be quite disruptive. A switch in vendors can mean abandoning most if not all, of a customer’s re-architected applications.

5. Retiring

Typically, the initial step in the cloud migration process is the discovery of your entire IT portfolio. Often, this discovery process entails application metering to determine the actual usage of deployed applications. It’s not unusual to find that anywhere between 10 to 20 percent of an enterprise IT estate is no longer being used. Retiring these unused applications can have a positive impact on the company’s bottom line; not just with the cost savings realized by no longer maintaining the applications, but by allowing IT resources to be devoted elsewhere, and by minimizing security concerns for the obsolete applications.

Source: https://www.imperva.com/blog/2018/01/five-cloud-migration-strategies-for-applications/

Why Adopt a Public Cloud

by: Ajay Khankhoje

Cloud and Virtualization- the buzz words of recent years have put many of us fazed in multitude of ways – What Cloud Means to our company? What Cloud offers to our product? Do we really need this? How to virtualize our existing servers? How to make load balanced servers? How to migrate existing application to cloud? What about cloud certifications? What about security of data in cloud? My client is a bank, should we migrate them to cloud without compromising on data security? We Offer complete range of cloud services from Planning Services, Lift & shift Services, Application Development, Integration Services, Build & Deployment services and Migration Services. Cloud Services leverage the new paradigm of cloud development helping customers overcome the limitations of existing IT architectures. Our Development process our fine tune to speed up the project’s time to market. PaaS: Compute | Spike | Scale Compute Overview : Most companies are undergoing a tough phase during the software development lifecycle. The key issues include setting up the server that hosts the web application, install and configure operating system, run time environment, setup test environment and other required middleware. Companies spend most of their time and resources to set up the development platform which is expensive and tedious process. These issues can be addressed by building and deploying applications on Cloud. Synergetics PaaS delivers a robust platform, allowing developers to build, test and deploy applications with ease. Letting the enterprises focus on application and innovation, rather than managing complex computing resources. Benefits : Application development framework : Our PaaS solution supports any frameworks that are based on the language of choice for that platform and lets you to build and run any number of applications as per your requirements. Improved resource utilization: Our solution streamlines application management by providing a stable and homogenous platform. Allowing enterprise to improve infrastructure utilization and speed up the productivity. Reduced cost: PaaS solution eliminates the cost of buying and managing hardware, software, platform tools and kits needed to build apps. Instead, all these are delivered as a service and offers a pay-as-you-go model. Spike Overview: Organizations have their business applications running on different workloads, that completely rely on the usage patterns. Some applications have stable users and some spiky and others unpredictable loads. For example, any eCommerce or gaming sites might experience spiky loads during holidays or time of day or day of the week. So, building and running application with on-premises infrastructure during spike demands incurs high up-front cost and requires additional resources to accomplish high performance. Synergetics addresses this by providing a highly scalable PaaS environment that ensures auto scaling of network, storage and compute resources as per the growing business needs. Benefits: Continuous delivery of products by overcoming any system crashes from unexpected spikes in demand Eliminates the downtime issue, customers can access applications comfortably during optimal usage periods Improve the speed of your production and outsome by letting the customers have a better access experience without any outages issue Scale Overview: Companies using complex and expensive on-premises infrastructure are likely to experience peak traffic issues. Due to the fluctuations in traffic pattern, there would be low utilization rates of high cost computing resources and maintaining them is also a huge hassle. Synergetics provides the reliable, scalable, secure, and high performance infrastructure required for the most demanding web applications. Enables Auto Scaling of servers that can grow or shrink on demand, that is it launches or terminates instances based on load. This shared platform automatically allocates the resources without changing the existing infrastructure, allowing users to deploy easily regardless of any application requirement changes. Benefits: Faster time to market: We provide highly scalable and automated PaaS solutions for developing applications efficiently, irrespective of any frequent changes made with the application requirements. Best fit for Agile: The scalable feature of our PaaS solution suits well for Agile application methodologies, by provisioning necessary platforms with an iterative and incremental development process. Improved collaboration: With PaaS solution, developers build applications rapidly by having an effective collaboration with the dev teams working at different geographic locations. IaaS: Core Infrastructure | Storage | Identity | Hybrid IT Core Infrastructure: Overview: Some recent research reports say that businesses are experiencing critical pressure in managing IT infrastructure efficiently, with a huge concern over cost savings and speed-to-market. Enterprises invest more than 75% of time and budget in managing the IT infrastructure such as servers, storage, identity and security services, networking and IT processes and compliance. This is essential to manage efficiently in today’s highly business competitive environment. Synergetics helps you understand and strive for a more secure, well-managed, and dynamic core infrastructure that will help enable you to reduce your overall IT costs, make better use of IT resources, and make IT a strategic asset for your business. Also, it supports IT professionals in the management of servers, desktops, mobile devices, and applications and in achieving high utilization rate of resource usage to eliminate unnecessary IT resource costs and complexity, ensuring your continuous business growth and outcomes, and establishing a responsive infrastructure. Synergetics delivers highly secure, scalable and well-managed core infrastructure with on-demand access to virtual servers, helping enterprises achieve extraordinary business value. Benefits: Highly scalable: We provide a flexible and scalable compute infrastructure, wherein you can quickly provision resources to meet your on-demand business requirements. Reduced cost: Core infrastructure minimises overall IT cost by offering a pay-as-you-go model, where you only pay for what you use. It also eliminates the complexity of unmanaged IT management by moving it to a dynamic Cloud environment. More secure: The dynamic core infrastructure is more secure and less vulnerable. Thus, the highly automated and proactive infrastructure management improves the speed of production and hence, outcomes. Storage Overview: As business technology continues to evolve, facing major challenges in storing and managing large volumes of data, the volume of information available to businesses continues to grow exponentially and needs to be stored, managed, and used by the business to drive future decisions. This storage management process is tedious and expensive. The main drivers for this information explosion include: Compliance – the requirement for legal and regulatory needs to store essential information; Business Value – the more a business knows about its markets, customers, competition, and overall business climate the better decisions they can make for the future; Customer Satisfaction – as business technology has increased, so too has consumer technology. Customers in all markets are becoming increasing tech savvy and demanding more from the businesses that serve them. This challenge can be addressed by Cloud storage. Synergetics Cloud storage provides a scalable and secure data storage, allowing you to access and manage your critical data efficiently. Benefits: Fast data access: Synergetics Cloud Storage provides fast and easy access to your data stored in multiple geographic locations. High utilisation rates: With Synergetics Cloud storage, soaring data can be moved to the Cloud, allowing you to store and manage the data efficiently. This increases utilisation rates without the hassle of maintaining the storage space. Robust storage: We ensure highly robust storage for your high potential data with a perfect data-backup solution to manage and maintain data with ease. In addition to this, unlimited storage capacity to scale up and down as per business requirements is available. Cost saving: Synergetics Cloud storage reduces costs through automation of storage management functions. This storage is highly elastic and provides virtualised resources to optimise cost and performance. Identity Overview: Industries started moving their workload to the Cloud, witnessing a real challenge in authorisation and access models in a Cloud environment. The primary issue is identifying users and creating appropriate access to enterprise resources while maintaining control and security. To accomplish this, Synergetics provides the organisation with a simple and strong Identity and Access Management solution to perform secure Cloud access with protection against threats. The highly secured solution creates value-added services that plug-in to any enterprise system and quickly integrates with a broad range of commercially available enterprise software packages. This results in reduced complexity, operational maintenance and business process costs. All leading to minimize on-going capital expense and rapid up time-to-market. Synergetics IAM solution provide all the benefits of the Cloud and achieves simplicity and robustness in every deployment, allowing enterprises to focus more on product innovation while seamlessly maintaining the highest level of security. Benefits: Increases productivity: We enable organisations to increase productivity by providing users self-service capabilities to manage their profile accounts independently. Users can enable single sign-on, instead of using multiple usernames and passwords. Faster synchronisation: Our IAM service extends your on–premises directory to automatically sync up with the Cloud. In addition, it simplifies the user and access management to Cloud resources. Meets on-demand business needs:The entire process of Identity and Access Management is critical for a growing, on-demand business. Our IAM solution helps easily reconfigure existing processes with new business processes. Hybrid IT Overview: Businesses often struggle finding an ideal solution to handle infrastructure for delivering heavy projects and scaling up, as per business requirements. By providing a common platform that spans private and public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud enables organizations to dynamically scale their IT infrastructure without changing the existing technology. Write, deploy, and manage applications in the Cloud the same way it is currently done. Synergetics delivers a solution for this by providing a secure and reliable Hybrid Cloud service, which supports your current workload and runs a number of applications effortlessly. Synergetics Hybrid IT advice is built on a seamless architectural solution that is quickly customizable to support your application and security needs. We can stretch your network layers seamlessly from your data center to a Cloud platform Hybrid service without the need for manual configuration changes. Network virtualization enables us to configure your security firewalls and network as on-premises data centers so that you can replicate the network your applications need to operate. Common Identity and Access Management across your onsite and offsite Cloud locations are provided. Benefits Core benefits of Hybird IT include: Quick shift of existing technology: With a Hybrid Cloud, enterprises can move their existing infrastructure quickly without any changes and provide a flexible application availability to experience the maximum benefits. Cost saving: Hybrid Cloud saves costs of buying an in-house server and allocates resource for scaling on-demand projects without investing in the local IT infrastructure. Data security: Hybrid Cloud provides high data security by keeping potential data behind the firewall and outside the public Cloud with proper data compliance.

Benefits of Onsite Training

The advantages of onsite training are many; first and the foremost is the overall cost and higher quality training itself. You will see your budget numbers going up when your staff will be sent to some remote location to attend a training course. Professionals do not have to leave their workplaces to receive training. That saves both time and energy and the training is proven to be more efficient as individuals receive hands-on experience relevant to their career profile.

On-site training might be right for you if there are five or more people in your group who need training on the same subject area, and you want a tailored approach to the course content around your application. Read on to find more reasons for choosing onsite training program.

Flexible: It is flexible as you will be the judge and making every decision. You will be choosing the ideal location or the environment, including the time structure and the training days i.e., evenings or weekends.

The saving: Yes, the saving aspect. You will not just be saving the cash in your pocket but also your precious time. It is time-efficient as delegates do not have time to travel usually. Based on the class size, duration and complexity you will can save a lot.  Plus, the cost of travelling and accommodation will be eliminated.

Maximise training budget: Since you will be saving around 30% to 60% of your expenses, you can spend that money in other things that really matter. You can spend on other training needs. See what your team needs the most, soft skill classes on productivity or collaborative work culture adoption.

Tailored program content: Focusing on the key points and challenges of your team and tailor the program accordingly. Tailoring your program will guaranteed make your training unique and relevant, which, in turn, will make utilizing the proven strategies highly effective during a crisis situation.

Consistent Learning: Everybody will be learning together, it will be consistent, rational and every member of the team will be on the same page. By having your employees trained at the same time by the same instructor, they will learn the same skills, essentially putting them all on the same page. Onsite training fosters teamwork as employees from different departments come together to discuss challenges faced by the organization.

Better results: This training also encourages team building. Delegates from different departments can take the training and understand each other’s role. They learn to work with each other and resolve conflicts.On-site training combines the knowledge retention gains of live training with the ability for workers to learn in their own environment, resulting in the best skills gain for your workforce.

In an effort to reach maximum number of students and provide them the training they need, Synergetics India offers several training programs. With onsite training, our instructor will come to your company’s location and provide the training that your employees need.