Is Cloud Migration Getting Automated?
For majority of firms, from large enterprises to SMEs (small and medium enterprises) migrating workloads from on-premise to the cloud is becoming a top most priority. Yet, companies are battling to execute cloud migrations within a comprehensive, soft and timely method.
Additionally, most organizations data centre infrastructures are an intricate set of systems with challenging resource efficiencies. These environments, often have complex network and storage architecture and they have different operating systems with their physical server, different virtualizations and private cloud platforms. Migrating of workloads to cloud is very difficult without proper tools and a proper cloud readiness assessment
Amidst the advantages the cloud provides, nobody likes the cloud migration process, which is where automation is gaining rapid hype in industry verticals. Automation in the field of cloud migration has made the process of shifting workloads easier and smoother than ever before. However automation tools cannot promise the execution of entire migration in all scenarios. Relying on the organizations workloads, applications, source and destination environment, automation can help fast-track the complete migration process, provided it has to be done through the right cloud provider.
Cloud migration automation
Today as automation is everywhere, there are a wide range of tools which organizations can opt for heavy lifting workloads during the cloud migration process. This helps organizations to drastically increase the migration speed while lowering the costs and by reducing the data loss risk while migrating.
Here are some of the benefits of opting for automation in cloud migration
Reduce Migration Time
In traditional process of cloud migration, organizations highly rely on manual processes and legacy technologies, which is very complicated and often time consuming. But with the advent of automation, it is proved that 80% of the cloud migration process is automated and no human intervention is needed, it drastically reduces the time consumed to migrate each and every enterprise workload to cloud. Automation also helps organizations to maintain the integrity and structure of the migrated data. Automation in cloud migration can also help organizations in avoiding disruptions and costly overruns and to deliver successful cloud migration within the limited time frame.
Lower migration costs
As per the Forrester research. Half of the cloud migration costs is labour cost. In most of the cloud migration projects there will be lot of repetitive task that would often require additional staff. With automation organizations can cut down some of the repetitive tasks that has to be done while moving workloads to the cloud. This also regulates the need for additional staff. Automation accelerates and simplifies the cloud migration process by delivering consistent and repeatable results across multiple environments. With automation there will be no scope for human errors.
Support Data Analytics
In regular cloud migration process organizations often face certain issues such as compatibility issues, process inconsistency and lack of knowledge on the process of data conversion among the it staff. With all these challenges in place it is very difficult to get the right analysis of the data migrating to cloud, this even results in increased IT costs. Automation helps IT leaders in drastically reducing the workload migration efforts by over 70% to better support the data analytics needs. Automation tools for data conversion helps organization to make their data an application from legacy systems to be compatible with the modern cloud applications, with increased operational visibility.
No business disruption during migration
Business disruption is one key problem area for the organizations to decide on cloud migration. Today almost all businesses are aimed at continuous service delivery and they cannot compromise on pausing or delaying their service delivery to the customers, this can impact their customer satisfaction and their business. Organizations need to focus on creating a zero business disruption mechanism while shifting large volumes of data, services and workloads to the cloud. Automation during the migration process helps businesses in accelerating their cloud migration journey and helps eliminate the impact on its business operations. Automated migration approach will not disrupt the critical application which are needed for the continuous service delivery during the migration process and the entire process is done in a smooth and faster way.
Automation adding value to cloud journey
The IT teams across the globe are leveraging automation to speed up the data infrastructure lifecycle by over 80 percent this helps them in gaining support for their data analytics needs. The data infrastructure feeding analytics through automation is proved to be more reliable and consistent, facilitating the organizations with enhanced access to appropriate enterprise data to better operations. For an organizationās customer base, analytics can power higher satisfaction rates and efficient workflows.
Integrating automation in cloud migration provides ample benefits such as lower risks, no fear for data loss, faster project delivery, increased team productivity and decreased costs, with all these benefits in place organizations no longer fear about their move to the cloud. In addition, companies can count on metadata-based automation to easily optimize cloud data warehouse for new data platforms, whenever if they need in future.
Automation is the foundation for attaining maximum ROI during an Enterpriseās cloud migration journey, it can be a pivot in a re-platforming approach. Cloud Readiness Assessment can be done in hours as the automated tools can easily access each and every application. In case of replatforming, it takes six to nine months if done manually, but with automation it just takes six weeks by deploying the right set of automation tools in place.
Finally, although this falls under the depth of functionality, it makes sense to call out automation functionality in particular. Even without automation, a cloud management tool can help you identify challenges and make the right decisions. However, automation is essential to realizing the full potential of your cloud investment.
