By now, most of us know that migrating workloads to the cloud isn’t like simply moving software from one server to another—especially in a complex enterprise infrastructure with many interdependent services and components. There are a lot of things that can go wrong: technical public cloud provisioning issues, security and compliance challenges, lack of cloud skills, wrong public cloud service provider (CSP) selection, unexpected costs, and more. The good news, however, is that all of these issues can be significantly minimized, if not entirely eliminated, with better migration planning that leverages high fidelity on-premises measurements and data science. And better migration planning requires a more accurate migration planning tool and proven methodology. Here are the five most common reasons enterprises think they don’t need migration planning tool—and why they are wrong.
Misconception #1: You think you can use free tools
It’s tempting to use the free tools that are available, but that can set you off on the wrong foot. Free tools use average values and incomplete data; for example, some offer cloud mapping and cost information but they use CPU compute averages to map resource demand and ignore disk performance, and some completely ignore storage. Think about the time, effort, and money wasted—not to mention disruption to your digital transformation efforts and the enterprise in general—by all the problems listed above. From that perspective, you can’t afford to not invest in a better migration planning approach. Virtana Workload Placement will enable you to understand the real current state of your on-premises data and SLAs, and it pays for itself by saving analysis time and avoiding expensive misconfigurations.
Misconception #2: You’ve already engaged a partner to help with cloud migration, so you’re all set
Bringing in a partner is smart, especially if you’re new to cloud migration. After all, they’ve done this before. They know the best practices and pitfalls and you can benefit from that experience. This is all true, but there’s one very important thing you may not realize. Most partners—even the top-tier systems integrators—use tools that were originally designed for other purposes, resulting in slower and inaccurate assessments. Virtana Workload Placement, which was designed specifically to accelerate migration, is often used by partners involved in cloud migrations and it complements their service capabilities. By arming your partner with Virtana’s high-fidelity tool set and approach that provides real-time data collection and analytics for full visibility into your on-premises workloads, you can plan smarter—and faster.
Misconception #3: You’re not accountable for public cloud migrations
Even if you’re not actively involved in the migration process, its success—or, more likely, any failure—will affect you in some way. What would it mean if a key dependency in your infrastructure breaks as a result of the migration? Or application performance slows to a crawl? Or usage spikes unexpectedly drive up costs? Cloud migration problems can have a widespread impact, so it’s in everyone’s best interest to ensure cloud migrations are as well planned and executed as possible.
Misconception #4: You don’t have time to evaluate a new tool
A little bit of time up front can help you save a lot of delays and headaches down the migration line. The good news is that you can activate your Virtana Workload Placement account in a matter of minutes, and we offer a free version that is populated with demo data so you can easily see the product in action.
Misconception #5: Your cloud migration is outsourced, so you don’t need to worry about planning details
Many companies outsource cloud migration and management to offload the work from overburdened teams to partners with cloud expertise. You still, however, want your migrations to happen as quickly and faultlessly as possible. The Virtana Workload Placement tool set and approach may be able to help them accelerate your migration, save you money, and add more value to what they do for you.
Virtana Workload Placement: Cloud migration planning made easy
Virtana Workload Placement is an intelligent cloud migration planning solution that provides you the information you need to accelerate and de-risk your migration to the cloud to get it right the first time, every time.
Virtana Workload Placement provides you with full visibility into existing on-premises workloads and the tools to make the best decisions about application priorities, grouping, and deployments so you can plan smarter cloud migrations. With Virtana Workload Placement you can:
- Perform workload discovery and inventory: Capture existing workload infrastructure data and metrics to fully understand workloads and understand dependencies between applications and the resources supporting them.
- Understand dependency mapping and modeling: Leverage advanced data science analytics to create prioritized move groups for applications and services based on complexity and improve the likelihood of a successful cloud migration the first time.
- Provide multi-cloud sizing and cost optimization: Compare rightsized costs across multiple public clouds and ensure the most efficient configurations based on risk, performance, and consumption as well as selecting the CSP with the best fit for your needs.
Ricardo Negrete
