“Mistakes to avoid in your cloud migration!” Interview with Tom Simon

Tom: We accompany our customers from the various stages of their cloud migration: from the initial consultation to the actual implementation of the migration, when evaluations and analyses have already been completed. Especially during the preparations, there are numerous things to pay attention to.

During the preparations, which mainly concern cost analysis, process selection and migration planning, it is important to carry out a comprehensive assessment. Here, one can pay particular attention to which support programs the individual hyperscalers offer. For example, if Amazon Web Services, or AWS for short, is chosen, the MAP program (= Migration Acceleration Program) is available, which provides organizational and financial support for the assessment, planning and implementation.

The assessment basically covers all relevant points that should definitely be addressed. Right at the forefront are the costs, and not just the cost savings achieved by migrating from on-premise to a cloud environment, but above all the long-term costs. You should directly address how to keep permanent cost points as low as possible, for example through Saving Plans or Reserved Instances. That way, you don't slide straight into the next project with the title "cost optimization" after the migration.

Tom: Spontaneously, I can think of three big misconceptions that we've heard numerous times at Innovations ON as an AWS partner, of course.

1. "It's just the migration, after that I'm done!" - It's not "just" the migration, if you decide to implement an IT infrastructure in a public cloud, you start a cloud journey. This journey does not end abruptly with the migration, but takes you further project by project and is permanently accompanied by the operation of your cloud environment. And as we all know, this operation never ends.
2. "Public cloud is more expensive than my previous on-premise environments!" - yes, but only if you start the migration with incomplete and rushed planning. During the analysis, among other things, the total costs of ownership are evaluated, i.e. what your on-premise environment costs compared to a cloud environment, in addition, your individual applications are examined for rightsizing in order to avoid unnecessary capacities and thus costs. In addition, hidden costs such as electricity for your own data center, or the procurement and operation of VMware are often not included in an overarching calculation.
3. "Public cloud is not secure!" - absolute fallacy. Every hyperscaler employs several hundred experts to ensure the security of its cloud. Large German data centers have on average about 20 security experts on staff. Imagine a successful hacker attack with global impact on hundreds of thousands of customers on Microsoft, Google or AWS - these companies would hardly be able to survive that, or at least not without long-term damage. So the unquestioning security of their environment is their secret to success.
   To this point, there are numerous other factors that increase the security of the environment: European or German data center to choose from, the right setup of one's own AWS environment and expert account management, and and and ...

Tom: My expert tip is relatively short: even if you have your own in-house experts who can easily set up and manage the cloud environment, bring a partner on board. They can challenge your approach, perform optimizations that you don't have time for, for example, or ideally introduce you to hyperscaler fundings so that the migration is as cost-effective as possible.
A partner in a cloud migration does not mean sending your own team to the bench, but rather leading them to success in an even more strategic and goal-oriented manner.