IaaS Cloud Migration Thoughts

I am often asked, "What does my organization need to focus on for our cloud migration?" What a loaded question! This line of questioning typically revolves around migrating applications and workloads to IaaS environments; it's less about the app or workload itself, and more about the process.

Enterprises typically fall into two camps when migrating to cloud: Lift and Shift or Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Some start with Lift and Shift and attempt to move to IaC, while others keep both approaches for different applications. For the purposes of this brief, I am grouping refactoring application environments or building a greenfield workload environment with IaC, leveraging the benefits IaC and DevOps bring.

The problem: neither approach provides an attestable source of truth required to maintain governance at scale.

Lift and Shift requires an overly permissive cloud environment for complete application environments to migrate successfully along with the administrative user permissions to keep it running. This matches what was needed on-prem, but this level of permission in the cloud introduces a level of risk most organizations are not prepared to accept and requires more staff to constantly respond to last-minute observed vulnerabilities. This creates an environment that costs more to host and is more difficult to operate and support 

IaC improves on Lift and Shift by providing a faster, more controlled deployment model. If an enterprise can mature to a fully orchestrated IaC model, deployment templates can provide consistency and put more eyes on changes before deployment. This scale, however, comes at a cost, and that is security.

Most organizations will have some form of both approaches. But for success and attestation in cloud, a new approach must be taken that underpins both while tailoring roles and responsibilities to fit the challenges of cloud environments. This is a tough ask for enterprises to do themselves, as there are years of precedent to overcome.

Roles must change through a very difficult process of stepping outside of the box most have been placed in and re-imagining how individuals and groups fit in this new cloud operating model. This is the most important piece to a successful cloud journey. Without it, enterprises inevitably come back to questions of who owns and is responsible for what. This causes confusion, empire-building, duplicate effort, over and under-training, increased costs and decreased security.

Change your mindset and change your seat. The new operating model and framework required for success in cloud can only be achieved through transparency, shared effort and mutual growth.

Reach out any time to discuss how we drive these conversations and break this effort down into consumable projects that realize investment in cloud at each stage.