Making the most of your Hybrid Cloud Migration

Featured article David Eichorn, AVP and Global Data Center Practice Head, Zensar Technologies

Enterprises understand the value of hybrid cloud models to achieve a variety of benefits, including lower startup costs, simplified management, and flexibility to scale storage on an as-needed basis. In fact, according to Gartner, nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.

Taking the steps to effectively manage and ultimately transform a legacy data center can be both costly and complicated if the organization does not have the right strategy in place. There are several delivery models organizations can choose from when managing their cloud migration, including, in-house, co-sourcing, and out-sourcing. Regardless of which model the organization chooses, it can benefit from collaborating with a hybrid IT service provider.

According to Tech Target’s IT Priorities Survey, 33 percent of respondents indicated that they plan to hire a hybrid cloud integration provider to help them with their migration process. Working with a hybrid IT services provider that possesses specialized expertise in hybrid cloud migration can help organizations achieve an accelerated simplified path to the cloud. Thus allowing them to experience the benefits of an updated high-performing data center, as well as lower ongoing operational expenses.

What should the organization look for when choosing a partner to help in their cloud migration?

When choosing a hybrid IT services provider, it’s important to look for one that can monitor across all hybrid environments – especially in cases where the organizations have multiple data center locations. Additionally, the provider should look across the organization and migrate the application/web-, database- and storage-tiers.

A qualified provider should be able to manage the entire migration process to mitigate any potential challenges. For example, migration from a legacy environment to a next-generation environment can significantly reduce the organization’s storage footprint, but there can be issues when transferring large amounts of data and it’s important to mitigate and prevent data loss.

Organizations should look for qualified hybrid IT service providers that have the capability to offer monitoring through a “single pane of glass”, with 24×7 monitoring of the complete cloud environment. This constant monitoring allows the service provider to remedy issues in real time, anticipate problems before they occur, prevent bottlenecks, and other IT holdups from impacting the end-user experience. This will help keep the bottom line intact.

Hybrid IT service providers can also leverage a very large distributed sourcing pool. A distributed sourcing pool plugs gaps and offers quality of service at a fraction of the cost an organizations would experience if they were to handle the project on their own.

In order to accelerate a cloud migration, the hybrid IT service provider should also share with the organization a migration process and methodology, as well as a migration readiness checklist to ensure the project runs smoothly.

Post-Migration Management

Organizations should ask themselves whether they are capable of managing the cloud environment post-migration. Many hybrid IT service providers will help with the migration, and then leave the organization on its own for the ongoing management. This can put severe strain on already-stretched and potentially untrained IT resources. If the organization needs help in maintaining an ongoing program, it should ask the following questions of a potential hybrid IT service provider:

* Do they provide integrated support for not only the operating system, but for the applications as well?

* Are they capable of provisioning new services and managing all data centers across the environment as one virtual data center?

* Can they collect and analyze the real-time metric and performance data that the data center provides?

As more organizations make the jump to the hybrid data center, they should assess their needs and determine the best way to collaborate with the right hybrid IT service provider to help complete the migration as cost effectively, and smoothly as possible, and to then manage the environment on an ongoing basis. In this way, the organization can take advantage of the hybrid cloud model without breaking the bank.

David Eichorn, AVP and Global Data Center Practice Head, Zensar Technologies, has more than 20 years of experience in IT and telecommunications.  He is currently responsible for Zensar’s Global Data Center Solutions Portfolio, consisting of a range of multi-vendor consulting, integration, support and managed services.   Prior to that, he was the company’s Product Champion for its Data Center Maintenance Services business. Before coming to Zensar, David worked for 15 years with Alcatel-Lucent in a variety of leadership positions across product and services organizations, driving record setting revenue in data switching and establishing the company’s managed services and network operations programs