#tidalmigrations

This is a response to a recent article on ZDNet by @steveranger, which does a great job at highlighting why early adopters of the cloud are facing some big hurdles when migrating their existing apps. Read original article here.

This summary (and the study it refers to[1]) bring up excellent points about the migration of older systems to the cloud and cloud-based IT in general. My experience with assisting customer migrations to Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS has shown it is seldom straightforward, never black and white and usually not trivial to fit legacy systems onto new infrastructures or platforms.

But it is also impractical to suddenly re-write fifty years of applications to be cloud native. One must prioritize their applications first, demonstrate progress and realize incremental value throughout a cloud adoption project.

As with almost any other IT project, up-front planning, discovery and goal-setting is critical. It’s not just choosing a cloud provider through a traditional procurement – it’s designing a multi-cloud hybrid architecture that is future-proof as much as it is useful right now - and then having the application assessment data at hand to execute migrations effectively.

This is how you make the most of your (on-average) $1mil+ infrastructure as quickly as possible.

Final Thoughts

A cloud migration is also not an automatic cure for IT immaturity – you still need good governance, leadership and management. As Geoffrey Moore indicates in his new book, Zone to Win, funding for innovation should not depend on operational cost reduction. There are many lessons to be learned from early cloud adopters, but we should also recognize that cloud migration requires specialized experience and a set of well-tested tools and engineering practices

-David Colebatch Chief Migration Hacker, Tidal Migrations