Forrester released its ten cloud computing predictions for 2018, and at the top of the list, are a couple of noteworthy things. First, they say that the global cloud market will total $178 billion, which is $32 billion more than last year. Second, they say that public cloud platforms, which include Microsoft Azure, are the fastest growing component of the market and they will generate $44 billion in 2018.
These numbers don’t really come as a surprise. So, why did I use “noteworthy” to describe them? Often times, as we approach the deadline of a big prediction, the industry analysts adjust their predictions down a bit to account for slower than expected adoption. In the case of cloud adoption, the numbers just keep rising the closer we get to the big prediction dates.
This continuing rise in adoption patterns is quite simple. Businesses and enterprises have realized that to be agile performers, they need to leverage the speed of the cloud—whether it’s a cloud data center, PaaS, IaaS, SaaS or more commonly, a combination. Azure Migrate by Microsoft and 10th Magnitude 10vū are both designed to work together to help CIOs and IT leaders develop a strategy that makes this possible.
Where are you in your cloud journey? Are you completing a massive cloud transformation to retool your application or data portfolio? Or, are you getting started with a small data center or a few workloads? Either way, it’s very likely that you’re feeling daunted. You likely need visibility into your environment to properly plan. The relationships and dependences between applications, workloads and data are crucial. Without that visibility, it can be difficult to create long-term plans.
Enter Azure Migrate
Azure Migrate is a new self-service tool from Microsoft that provides discovery and assessment services for moving VMs and VM-based applications over to Azure infrastructure. Currently available as a free service, systems administrators can use it to understand their environments better. It can discover and assess on-premises virtual machines, size VMs to Azure virtual machines, and report on compatibility while offering guidelines for potential issues. It also integrates with Azure Data Migration Service for database discovery and migration.
In many use cases, this tool alone could be sufficient to define and begin executing your cloud strategy, especially if you’re a small company and just starting to think about your cloud strategy. If you’re considering a “shift and lift strategy” for your VMs, it could give you an idea of what you’re looking at in terms of cost and compatibility. If you’re a sizable enterprise with complex infrastructure and environments, it can get your feet onto the path of digital transformation by providing clarity regarding a small collection of VMware hosts.
Transformation Strategy for an Imperfect world
Most enterprises aren’t perfect. And, the larger they get, the less perfect they are. Proper planning and execution starts with an understanding of the current state. The more complex the environment, the more thorough that understanding must be. A robust, enterprise strategy really needs to be grounded in deeper information than the initial questions answered by Azure Migrate. To be successful you will need a deeper understanding regarding sizing, uptime, pricing controls, where interdependencies lie, and so on. Azure Migrate will help provide the initial clarity, but when complexity is present, you can build a more bullet proof strategy by building on top of Azure Migrate.
If you have a complex environment with more than 200 VMs, aging applications, mismatched legacy infrastructures and data or workloads that might be best left on-premises, Azure Migrate might not be able to give you the full picture you need to guide your cloud transformation journey. Further, if your migration considers application modernization, data platform evolutions, DevOps, containers, or any of the more advanced capabilities of Azure, you will likely need to dig a bit deeper.
10vū & Azure Migrate: Better Together
Enterprises often benefit from comparing their current environment with data and references gathered from hundreds of successful implementations. 10th Magnitude 10vū provides a framework for that type of high-level business model. The 10vū framework goes beyond the basic comparative analysis to include other views of the data center; spend analysis, options to reduce spend, the level of effort to prepare your environment for a cloud migration and the level of effort required to move your assets to the cloud. Based on this type of framework, your organization can better align priorities, determine application-level compatibility and develop migration phases for the efforts to come.
Cloud transformation is not just about virtual machines and shuttering data centers. It’s a major change that can affect a company financially, change its culture and shift responsibilities. It requires human beings to collaborate and support a central strategy with a long term vision for harnessing the power of the cloud.
Together 10vū and Azure Migrate can help prepare your organization for a holistic cloud transformation.
For more information on 10th Magnitude 10vū, check out our Cloud Strategy.
