Unlocking the power: The keys to delivering successful Cloud Migrations

Delivering Successful Cloud Migrations Despite the many benefits of moving to the Cloud, large enterprises frequently struggle to deliver migrations (and the related business transformation) in the planned timeframe.

Why? What are the key factors that ensure a successful migration that becomes an oft-quoted industry benchmark for a Cloud driven transformation; rather than a moribund initiative where a number of insurmountable impediments result in an early stall? In this blog, targeted at leaders undertaking a programme of transformational change, we aim to highlight the key factors that ensure success (or otherwise).

Corporations have been undergoing application migrations to new infrastructure variants for decades; whether the change involved virtualisation for the first time, or moving from their own data centres to a dedicated host facility. With each incremental move, the benefits improved, but many of the buildings blocks central to migration success have remained the same. You know them already, right? A sound plan. Operational readiness. Robust testing mechanisms.

What follows is a list of 7 key considerations that supplement those essential building blocks. We believe all 7 are closely interlinked. They are:

1. Ownership of the aspiration

2. Accountability through robust metrics

3. Early understanding of external barriers

4. Starting fast & quick wins

5. Effective planning and skills uplift (Operational Readiness)

6. Meaningful incentivisation

7. Stakeholder and change management

1) Ownership of the Aspiration

““A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” — Greek Proverb.

Senior Business ownership for the migration, driven by a CEO clearly utilizing IT to drive business benefits in their industry vertical, is key. Ideally, this is reflected in strategy statements for the coming years. Perhaps more important though, is ensuring that this philosophy is embraced by the next few layers of management, and reflected in those business unit’s own plans and goals. Otherwise it’s merely a statement linking IT trends to business goals, in a document that looks good to shareholders.

Ownership of the Aspiration What should also be clear is that purchasing mechanisms have been adjusted to allow for procurement of cloud services. As budgeting often happens in yearly cycles, but Cloud programmes are multi-year, IT purchasing systems / processes must be updated to drive a “cloud first” consideration for any build / buy decision that involves purchasing teams. Dispensation for not doing so needs to be at a level senior enough to ensure it’s not just circumvented.

Finally, when barriers to “cloud first” decisions arise, does the sponsor of the Cloud Programme have the authority to actually remove them? If not, then teams will largely determine their own Cloud aspirations and whether they truly want to continue.

If today’s aspirations and plans are embedded into strategy and mechanisms, then they’ll survive changes in leadership or in-quarter market pressures, especially as most migration programmes in large Enterprises run over several years. There will be less chance of them being consigned to the waste bin of “someone else’s idea”.

2) Accountability through Robust metrics

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” – Peter Drucker

Accountability through Robust metrics Having established a multi-year business strategy that is enabled by a Cloud driven transformation, meaningful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are a must to measure and justify the decision. It’s important that when creating these they can easily be measured (without too many tweaks to current mechanisms) and that they can be listed on one hand (two max). Anything more and countless analyst and operations hours may be invested in gathering and presenting data, that many leaders don’t have the time to digest (undermining their relevance very early on).

There must also be a flow down of KPIs, such that accountability for meeting targets is adopted by Senior Manager, Line Managers and Individuals. For example, if a business of 50,000 people, supported by 1000 IT staff, has a target to improve time-to-market for new feature requests for its many business application, but no-one in the development team is tasked to reduce build-and-test time windows (using new tech), then it’s a meaningless measure. Accountability must flow down to each level in the organisation.

A happy accident of developing these KPIs to drive progress, will be the ability to measure the value and benefits the Cloud journey will bring.

3) Early Understanding of External Barriers

“Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.” – Michael Jordan

Even if the business is bought into a growth strategy underpinned by a multi-year Cloud transformation and even if KPIs have permeated the organisation from top to bottom, to help measure expected migration benefits, there will likely be other obstacles to adoption.

Often these are driven by external factors such as industry regulation, compliance and local laws. These are then interpreted by the teams asked to police them on behalf of an organisation, to reduce exposure to risk e.g. Security, Compliance, Public Policy

It’s rare that these interpretations keep pace with the leading edge or bleeding edge of technological advancement. Even if new ways of working and new technology is backed by IT and the business, the time needed to thoroughly understand the new risk posture may lead to delays and result in a stall.

To mitigate for this, transformation leads and the sponsor should do 3 things:

· make sure regulatory, compliance and security stakeholders are engaged as early as possible. Even as early as the strategy setting stage

· As the migration mechanism is built, ensure these teams are embedded into the build and test cycles with sufficient time to address their requirements

· Share the burden of the “risk” so that those teams asked to police and govern the business on everyone’s behalf, don’t feel personally exposed to decisions related to new technology implementations.

4) Starting Fast and Quick Wins

“Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest antelope, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or an antelope – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.” – African Proverb

“I heard the CRM team moved their app to Development in a week and are already making improvements to the back-end code. It’ll switch to production next month”. As an anecdote that passes through the business, this is infinitely more compelling than hearing “ they have been trying to get that application into production for about 6 months now”. The latter creates the impression of slow, cumbersome transformation that might be more trouble than it’s worth.

For this reason, forward momentum is key.

To that end it’s important to select a handful of migration targets, for which the move to AWS is likely to be uncomplicated (e.g. few application interdependencies). They should also be supported by a team with a known appetite to innovate, and where benefits are easy to demonstrate.

This needs to be offset however, with not selecting applications of such simplicity that they are viewed of little significance to the business.

Finally, and as mentioned, those early migrations need to ensure the engagement of compliance teams as soon as possible. This way a “full migration” is more likely to occur i.e. the workload gets all the way to production, with the old environment decommissioned and demonstrable improvements in cost, resilience and performance.

5) Effective planning and Skills Uplift (Operational Readiness)

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”–Abraham Lincoln

Planning may be the least interesting Effective planning and Skills Uplift (Operational Readiness) and most time-consuming part of any migration, but it’s essential.

The good news is that whether Agile or Waterfall or somewhere in between, experience of migrations exists in depth in the industry. Yes, there are different migration tools and different service names to become familiar with , such Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). But the information gathering to support a migration is often as it’s always been; just broken down into smaller consumable packages of repeatable work (migration trains). Keeping this in mind can help it become overwhelming and less like putting a man on the moon.

Preparing teams to support, operate and innovate on the cloud may well be the hardest part of the endeavour.

From a planning perspective, it’s critical to align any training (hands-on, shadowing, and formal) to the migration schedule. It can prove useful to invest time in a business wide skills gaps review, to plan for uplifting cloud knowledge and competency across the organisation. However, this often represents a point-in-time gap in organisation knowledge and won’t always map to an, often fluid, migration plan. Ensuring upskilling is a success, means targeting training to take place just before, during and post workload switch over. The best training is often facilitated workshops (Experience Based Accelerators) to drive hands-on experience of the AWS tools and principles (reinforcing the “use it or lose it” dictum)

6) Meaningful incentivisation

“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” Charlie Munger

At the level of the individual, we will always ask ourselves, ”Why am I doing this?” “What’s the benefit to me in the long term?” “Will it make my life easier?”. It’s just human nature to enquire as to the return-on personal investment.

Incentivisation is key here; motivating the teams adopting the technology. But it’s not just about the hygiene factors (pay and working conditions). The move to Cloud provides the opportunity to truly address the elements of the job that are believed to lead to improved satisfaction (recognition, advancement, and growth).

If teams can see the organization is evolving to a Cloud focused structure, but can also see how it will help advance their own careers, with access to skills and knowledge that will keep them current and ahead of the technology curve, they are more inclined to champion it. In part they have to believe it, which is where we circle back to owning the aspiration and KPIs to drive accountability. Once convinced, everyone wants to know how to get involved and what opportunities (training, promotion, new job role) might be on offer.

Make sure you consider the benefits to the individual and support their access to them.

7/ Stakeholder and Change Management

“Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing”. John D. Rockefeller

Ensuring effective communication and engagement with stakeholders throughout the transformation process is crucial. This includes keeping stakeholders (including customers, partners and peers) informed; both addressing concerns and involving them in decision-making.

Engaging and communicating effectively, and building robust mechanisms to manage change has a number of benefits. First the trust earned encourages your teams to buy into the journey and so helps to maintain velocity. Secondly, it can lead to effective problem-solving in the unfortunate event of a crisis, minimising any damage to the business or brand. Finally, it can help the organization see around corners, as the number of potential risks is called out openly and mitigated early.

Conclusion

By taking the time to address each of these key considerations in the inception and planning phases, the bedrock for a successful migration are in place. It can help to view each of the 7 considerations as major risk that needs to be addressed. The mitigations to each being:

Appointment of an empowered and enthusiastic business owner.
Agreement to 5 metrics to measure progress and success (that are easy to measure).
Agreement with/ regulatory, compliance & security stakeholders as to their roles in the migration.
A list of pilot migrations, agreed with the business, that can provide meaningful insight for the rest of the programme.
A gap analysis for missing Cloud skills & timeframe to address these by support function.
A list of expected benefits to the individuals that will deliver the migration & operate the new environment.
A draft communication plan for all stakeholders.

What if you don’t address each of these recommendations? The chances are that you will suffer some sort of stall. In the worst case the migration will be deemed a failure and curtailed. That’s when the organization risks a technological malaise in regard to Cloud; which eventually results in failing to capitalize on the technological trends that will drive competitive advantage in your business vertical.

What Next?

lets get started As a next step we suggest ranking the 7 key considerations as you believe they relate to your own organisation. At the top (number one) list the item you believe is most likely to impact your transformation / migration agenda, through to the item least likely to (number seven).

Once completed reach out to your AWS Account Manager to get guidance on AWS programmes and mechanisms that can assist in addressing this prioritized ranking.

Alternatively, if you want to gain some of that insight early, we’ve listed below a curated set of AWS resources (whitepapers, tools & mechanisms) that offer invaluable further reading.

AWS resources to help on the journey

1. Ownership of the Aspiration