Five Capabilities to Keep Your Cloud Migration on Budget and on Time
James Morman, Director, Enterprise Cloud Architecture, Lincoln Financial Group
James Morman, Director, Enterprise Cloud Architecture, Lincoln Financial Group
I recently read an article that stated while big insurers are moving applications into the cloud, the results are not meeting expectations. Two major factors contributing to this sentiment are project delivery time and cost, including overruns incurred and failed saves. As someone who is often tasked with managing budgets and validating return on investment according to timelines, I have found that getting the proper groundwork in place and appropriately decomposing and scaling your migration projects are key to delivering successfully within time and financial commitments.
There are five capabilities that an organization must have to enable truly successful migrations. Now, purely on a financial basis, a lift and shift of your legacy applications, dragging along all their technical debt, might make short-term sense to avoid new capital expenditure. But, in the slightly longer term, the prospect of running your applications in a cloud provider without covering these subjects your company to risks that can easily dwarf your savings.
The first is architecture, and there are two parts to this: your cloud architecture and your application architecture. Cloud architecture sets the framework for your cloud infrastructure, covering cloud strategy, vendors, how accounts are structured and managed, and the promulgation of patterns, services, and use cases. The cloud paradigm changes the equation for your application architecture – you are no longer locked into a particular architecture and underlying hardware. Now is the time to re-examine your application architecture.
Cloud-aware applications use new modern architectural paradigms. Think of microservices, decoupled applications, and event-driven architectures. Your application architects will help you take advantage of the opportunities afforded you by the cloud and enable you to address potential issues with cost, security, and resilience. Moving your functions to run on serverless infrastructure can provide immediate benefits in the consumption-based model as well as performance and scaling. Your cloud migration value will be in the integration of your applications and their development into the cloud architecture. With the flexibility afforded by using cloud-based infrastructure, you will be able to do continuous improvement. You will be able to recognize the performance and operational capabilities in the form of scalability and resiliency in ways that are much better and easier than what you’d find in your traditional data centers.
FinOps may well be an overlooked capability, but it is critical to a larger organization's migration. Cost is not the reason to move to the cloud. Beyond the obvious challenges of moving from capital to expense budgeting, it is even quite possible that your costs may increase. In fact, without an overseer in place and using a non-cloud-centric design, you’re almost guaranteed to spend more, at least at first. FinOps can look across the organization and find savings opportunities in volume and services that aren’t possible for an individual application. They also provide cost transparency in the allocation of the costs from the cloud vendor back to business, helping application owners understand the impact of the cloud’s pay-for-what-you-use model. A great FinOps team pays for themselves both financially and in their contributions to your cloud maturity culture.
Your cloud security team is a central capability. All the capabilities are required, but security needs to be at the center, and you need a top-flight cloud security team. The internet is rife with stories of companies with misconfigured cloud resources that enabled criminal compromise. Building your cloud infrastructure is an entirely new and complex skill for most. In a regulated industry, it is important to be proactive and develop guardrails for the services that you want your developers to use and disable those you haven't yet secured. Recognize that this critical piece of work is likely to impact your timeline and plan accordingly. Understanding your applications' requirements, the service use cases, and your potential risks is needed to get this right and facilitate your migration to the cloud with a mature security posture.
Automation Can Be A Huge Cost Saver By Leveraging Infrastructure-As-Code, Consistency Across Environments And Automating Everything From Build To Testing, Backups, And Recovery
Your ability to manage your applications and avoid cloud sprawl hinges on your cloud engineering function. To avoid heading off into non-compliant directions, you need engineering to build your framework. Cloud engineering creates the organization and vending of the accounts. Engineering is responsible for your inter-account connections and networking that control addressing and traffic flows. Expect to spend both time and money getting this right, including procuring security devices and dedicated network connectivity. And those guardrails that you have developed with cloud security are implemented and enforced by cloud engineering.
Finally, you will need cloud operations. You won’t be running long in the cloud before you find that your vendor also experiences issues and will need a team responsible for managing the impact and the vendor relationship. Successful migration to the cloud entails a fundamental difference in how that application will function post-migration. Operating in the cloud, if you are moving to modern architectures, not only requires some new skills but also offers opportunities to improve your processes. In a cloud environment, your world is available through APIs. Automation can be a huge cost saver by leveraging infrastructure-as-code, consistency across environments, and automating everything from build to testing, backups, and recovery. Taking the time to build this new muscle in your organization will pay dividends.
Building and migrating applications to the cloud is absolutely worth the investment. But to realize the resiliency, improved security, cost benefits, and agility, you must be deliberate about how you design your framework and execution model. It will require resources and a healthy amount of patience to build the capabilities in conjunction with the applications to reap the fruits of that labor.
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