SUMMARY: Cloud migration is a crucial strategy for organizations looking to stay competitive in today's fast-paced digital landscape. However, traditional approaches to cloud migration may not be sufficient to address the unique challenges that organizations face when moving to the cloud. By embracing the five innovation imperatives of cloud migration that are unlocked through graph technology and graph applications - visibility, agility, collaboration, executive oversight, and cost-effectiveness - organizations can overcome these challenges and achieve a successful cloud migration. This, in turn, allows them to maximize their return on investment and remain competitive in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Introduction
For organizations pursuing cloud migration as a strategy, it presents one of the biggest challenges today - and despite significant investment, many are failing to realize the full benefits of the cloud. Traditional approaches to cloud migration may be to blame, as they often fall short in addressing the unique challenges that organizations face when moving to the cloud. They also don’t always position organizations for further success in their cloud modernization efforts.
Organizations need to take a new approach that emphasizes visibility, agility, collaboration, executive oversight, and cost-effectiveness. Becoming graph-driven is one of the fastest and most effective ways to embrace these imperatives. In this way, organizations can overcome the challenges of cloud migration and unlock the full potential of the cloud both now and in the future.
Innovation Imperative #1: Visibility
A cloud migration strategy without comprehensive visibility into an organization's IT environment can lead to a high degree of uncertainty and an inability to accurately assess potential risks and opportunities. Graph technology is a valuable tool for achieving true visibility.
By mapping out the entire IT landscape, including critical components like applications, servers, databases, network devices, and storage systems, graph technology provides a comprehensive and dynamic system of record that enables organizations to make informed, contextual, and accurate data-driven decisions about their cloud migration.
For example, teams can better identify systems that are particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks and prioritize their migration to the cloud. They can also identify redundant or underutilized applications and consolidate them to optimize cloud costs.
Graph technology also incorporates relationships and dependencies between components, which is critical for minimizing disruptions during migration and optimizing cloud workloads. A database application may be dependent on a certain network device or server for example, but without having that dependency clearly defined within the graph, teams may migrate a database before the device or server, leading to downtime and data loss.
Innovation Imperative #2: Agility
Outdated traditional approaches force organizations to endure slow, costly and inefficient migrations, where teams spend months or even years trying to map out every detail of the migration before even starting. But the IT environment, business needs, and competitive landscape can change quickly, rendering the original plan irrelevant. This approach also involves moving entire applications or systems at once, which can cause major disruptions and delays.
In contrast, an agile approach to cloud migration focuses on incremental, iterative migrations that can quickly adapt to changes in the IT environment, business needs, and competitive landscape.
By breaking the migration into smaller, more manageable pieces, teams can quickly respond to issues or changes and make adjustments as needed. This approach also allows organizations to start realizing the benefits of the cloud more quickly, even as the migration process continues.
To achieve an agile cloud migration approach, teams must quickly respond to issues or changes and make adjustments as needed. This requires having access to real-time, accurate, and up-to-date data. When teams work with multiple data sources or different versions of data, it can lead to confusion, errors, and delays in decision-making.
Graph application platforms built on top of graph technology can provide teams with a unified, governed, and accurate single source of truth around migration data, allowing them to make informed decisions quickly and confidently.
Innovation Imperative #3: Collaboration
Despite breaking down data silos, organizational silos still pose a challenge for successful cloud migration projects. Successful cloud migration projects require a high level of collaboration and communication between multiple stakeholders, each with their unique insights, expertise, and responsibilities.
But coordinating efforts and ensuring everyone is on the same page can be a major hurdle, especially when teams span across different departments. It's crucial to connect and streamline the processes that need to occur between these teams.
In addition to providing comprehensive visibility and a unified set of migration data, graph applications also promote efficient cross-functional collaboration and teamwork. Teams can assign ownership and track the progress of the migration effort by defining roles and responsibilities, setting deadlines and milestones, and tracking progress against them.
This ensures everyone is accountable, and the project stays on track from conception to completion. With status, alerts, and monitoring capabilities, stakeholders can quickly identify issues, take corrective actions, and make informed decisions in real-time, such as developing and implementing a remediation plan.
Innovation Imperative #4: Executive Oversight
Successful cloud migration projects require strong leadership and executive oversight, which is particularly important for CTOs and CIOs. As the person responsible for overseeing the organization's technology infrastructure, the CTO or CIO needs a specific perspective into the state of the migration.
Graph technology and applications are valuable tools for providing executive oversight, including real-time updates on the progress of the cloud migration effort, such as the number of systems that have been migrated, the percentage of the overall effort that has been completed, and the estimated time remaining until completion.
Additionally, CTOs or CIOs can effectively analyze the costs associated with the cloud migration effort and identify opportunities for optimization. They can view detailed cost analysis reports that provide an overview of the costs associated with each system or application migrated to the cloud.
They can also better understand performance metrics, such as uptime, response time, and resource utilization. This information can be crucial for identifying potential performance bottlenecks. Project leaders can also more effectively monitor compliance requirements and regulations, ensuring that the cloud environment meets all necessary regulatory and legal standards.
Innovation Imperative #5: Cost-Effectiveness
We’ve already covered a few of the ways that these innovative imperatives can help create an overall more cost-effective approach to cloud migration:
Increased visibility can help identify redundant and underutilized applications and systems which can then be consolidated systems to optimize cloud costs;
The agile approach helps streamline migration processes and workflows, resulting in a more efficient use of resources;
The collaboration data collected as part of this effort can be used to analyze and continuously optimize cloud performance;
And, executive decisions can be made, like consolidating systems to optimize cloud costs.
But the cost savings don't stop once the cloud migration is complete. The graph data generated during the migration can be used for other cloud modernization efforts, such as application rationalization, server optimization, or cloud automation. Organizations can also combine the graph data with other sources to drive cost savings and enhance organizational efficiency in new and innovative ways.
For instance, the data can be combined with customer behavior data to optimize the organization's cloud environment for better customer experiences. Additionally, it can be used in conjunction with operational data to identify patterns and inefficiencies in business processes, leading to further cost savings and process optimization.
By leveraging the graph data in creative and unique ways, organizations can continue to benefit from their cloud migration efforts and maximize their return on investment.
Want to see a graph application for cloud migration in action? Watch the Intelligent Cloud Migration [Demo]:
Conclusion
To successfully migrate to the cloud, organizations should prioritize the five innovation imperatives: visibility, agility, collaboration, executive oversight, and cost-effectiveness, that can be unlocked by becoming graph-driven. By leveraging graph technology, organizations can gain comprehensive visibility into their IT environment, break down data silos, and collaborate more effectively across departments. Additionally, graph technology provides valuable tools for executive oversight, allowing CTOs and CIOs to analyze costs, performance metrics, and compliance requirements. Finally, the data collected during cloud migration can be leveraged for other cloud modernization efforts to drive cost savings and enhance organizational efficiency in new and innovative ways. By following these recommendations, organizations can achieve a successful cloud migration that maximizes their return on investment and positions them for long-term success in the digital landscape.