Leveraging cloud migration services for a smooth cloud migration journey

You’ve based your cloud migration strategy and roadmap on reaching specific top- and bottom-line goals through greater operational agility, scalability, security and resiliency. The journey requires effective application and workload cloud migration that uses the right cloud platforms, services, tools and technologies. This all hinges on your ability to choose and make the most of cloud migration services. But what are cloud migration services, and how do they fit into the puzzle that is your cloud migration strategy and roadmap?

What are cloud migration services?

When you hear the term "cloud migration services", it refers to the way businesses move to the cloud along with the tools and providers that get them there. A closer look shows that this is a potentially vast list of services and providers that are divided between cloud services providers (CSP) and cloud migration managed services providers.

There is a great deal of overlap among these two broad groups as CSPs like Azure, AWS, Oracle and Google all offer tools and services to help migrate your workloads and applications. The cloud migration managed services providers help your business use that vast array of cloud provider services. They also use a host of proprietary services and third-party cloud application migration services to fulfill your cloud strategy.

In this blog, we break down the cloud migration consulting services of cloud migration managed services providers and then take a deeper dive into cloud migration services and tools.

The role of managed services providers

Your cloud migration strategy and roadmap will reveal the path you take, and the destination points you use as benchmarks along the way to meet agility, scalability, cost savings and other goals. But this will only point the way to the cloud migrations services you will need and want to make the cloud migration a reality rather than pinpoint which services to use when and how.

We always need to keep in mind that there is no permanent end-state to a cloud migration strategy and the broader cloud strategy. The sound reasoning behind this is that your business, applications, workloads, markets and customer needs are always changing.

Leveraging cloud migration tools and services

Cloud migration and automation tools play a key role in your cloud migration journey. The list of software tools and services from CSPs, cloud migration managed services providers and third-party tools is very long. This is because every mile in every cloud migration journey is different with:

• hybrid, private, and multicloud environment choices
• different CSP destinations for different workloads, applications and databases
• many different infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) vendors and solutions

In the era of the digital business where data is king, cloud migration is the foundation of future agility, innovation, cost savings and meeting growing mobile end-user and customer demands. Migration processes, tools and services are the framework built upon that foundation enabling you to quickly, cost effectively and efficiently handle:

• moving data between on-premises and cloud systems
• cross-platform operating system migrations
• hardware migrations because of upgrade or failure

Clearly, application, workload and database migration services must deliver scalable, robust and easily managed data cleansing and replication tools. They must be capable of automating the migration process and handling the variety and volume of data that needs to be migrated across on-premises and cloud environments. In a complex project with many component tasks, it’s critically important to have a single point of control and a single view of all relevant activities that includes network performance, and bandwidth and latency issues.

It’s more than a full-time job to keep up with all the cloud migration tools available today and gaining the expertise in using and determining which are best for every unique situation and how to manage it all. Ideally, you want to know how to integrate them into a long-term cloud strategy and minimize the number of tools and services your business uses by considering services offered by industry leaders. This supports a successful cloud journey and future business state, which is easier with a migration partner that’s already been there.

A platform approach allows your cloud migration managed services provider to discover, configure, integrate and manage services across multiple applications and technology partners. By using a service integration layer as part of a platform-based approach, they can decouple workloads from underlying IT operations. This enables all the complex functions common to workloads to be provided as a service and create greater value according to the NTT Global Managed Services Report.

Importance of cloud migration managed services

Cloud migration managed services are the best way to bring deep and constantly updated knowledge and expertise on the migration tools of all four major CSPs. The best of these cloud migration consulting services become partners that support customized cloud and migration strategy development that can adapt to your enterprise’s ongoing migration and transformation journey needs.

Most of your peers see cloud migration managed services providers as the key to making their enterprise competitive, agile and innovative global organizations through cloud modernization. Over 62% of enterprises that see little importance in trusted service providers are non-competitive and transformation laggards, according to our Global Managed Services Report.

An ideal cloud migration managed services partner should bring extensive experience in application optimization, management and security. These cloud migration experts should be capable of taking on-premises enterprise applications to cloud environments via application services that span the most commonly used applications like:

• Oracle E-business Suite, Hyperion, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft 
• SAP HANA
• Microsoft 365
• custom applications

This should include proven migrations services expertise in moving these and other applications across various CSP environments based on best fit and long-term cloud integration strategies. That includes an ability to support you across hybrid cloud or multicloud strategy, on-premises, hosted, private and public cloud across all major CSPs.

The right cloud migration managed services partner will have clear expertise and proven successes using cloud migration services ranging from proprietary to CSP and third-party providers. This working knowledge is crucial to filling any gaps you have in making sure it’s a smooth cloud migration journey that delivers defined results.

Since every successful cloud and migration strategy has security built into every aspect of the cloud journey, having secure-by-design solutions are paramount. This ensures that they can provide an integrated portfolio of Managed Public Cloud Services that include:

• Ongoing cybersecurity advisory and security consulting
• Cloud assessment and transformation

The right cloud migration managed services partner brings the ability to assess, use and consult on a wide variety of cloud migration services and tools from many sources. By collaborating with your team on best service choices for each step in your cloud journey, you're assured of achieving the business outcomes that will make you competitive in a changing digital future.

Conclusion

While the average company runs hundreds or even thousands of applications, only a fraction of them will migrate to the cloud. That handful of enterprise apps have the potential to lower capex and opex, increase business agility and scalability, meet customer and end-user demands and pave the way to new lines of business.

We’re fortunate that there are countless cloud migration services and tools that support the cloud journey at every step. But it’s unlikely that anyone on your team has anything close to full knowledge of them and how best to use them based on your cloud strategy and cloud migrations strategy.

The right cloud migration managed services provider can bring that level of expertise and understanding in a consulting-led approach to align the right services to your business needs and goals. By partnering with many clients in your industry and other industries, they’ve learned how to put in the work to understand your challenges and your people. They can then partner with you to share that knowledge and collaborate on defining the best services that match your cloud migration strategy at every juncture in the ongoing journey.

They can share a vision of your wider business outcomes to minimize those services and always leverage automation to reach those outcomes quickly, efficiently and cost effectively. And most of all, they bring a security management framework that encompasses every decision, choice and implementation of every process, service and tool.

For our Managed Services Team, understanding what makes your IT organization, your business and your people unique makes us an ideal cloud migration managed services provider. By working to understand and help you define where you want to be in the digital age, and what you want to do today and tomorrow, we can support you in every step of your cloud journey.

To learn more about our cloud migration services, click here.