Seven Reasons to Outsource Your Move to the Cloud

Why you should hire professionals for your house—or cloud—moves.

I was talking to someone the other day who asked me why they should consider outsourcing their planned VM migration to the cloud. They felt they were perfectly capable of doing it themselves.

The question I asked in return was, “Why do you hire movers to help you move house when you absolutely could do it yourself?” Having just moved, I was ready to help with the following answers:

1. They derisk your scheduling and people planning. Professional movers run move projects every day, so their ability to schedule and estimate effort and time is much better than someone who only does it a few times in a lifetime. I speak from experience when I say that I completely underestimated the time and effort required for my home move. We also see this happening in our customer base when our clients do their own cloud migrations. Bringing in people with experience means less schedule risk.
2. They get it done faster. In addition to the issues of manpower and scheduling above, professional movers are generally much faster and efficient. Pros in a “time is money” business like house moving know how to divide and conquer even the largest house move and plan the truck loading. Similarly, experts in migrations—even with the same team size—can almost always complete work faster due to practiced efficiency and developed “muscle memory.” Ultimately, they provide faster completion and “time to value.”
3. They have all the right equipment. I ran out of boxes and blankets to protect my furniture more than a few times in my DIY move, and, yes, a few things got broken as a result. The same applies in a VM migration—relying on professionals and their tools means that the applications can be discovered, dependencies mapped and move groups identified. This results in a smooth move with less (or, possibly, no) down time.
4. They offer a fixed fee option. I hired two young lads to help and thought I knew how many hours I’d need them for. Referring back to point number one, though, it took much longer than I thought and I ended up paying more than I hoped. A good mover will give you a fixed price—which is much easier on your bank account. A good VM migration partner will have the skills and confidence to assess your environment and needs. They can give you a single fixed price on your VM migration because they know what it takes, and they’re confident in their estimates.
5. They give you time back. When you move yourself, all that work is on top of your regular life activities—you still have to work, mow the lawn, take care of the kids, walk the dog. Fitting in your regular duties is one of the most challenging parts of moving—whether houses or VMs—and you run the risk of making mistakes in both areas. Outsourcing your VM migration to an expert means you don’t have to put other parts of your job on hold. You also won’t have a huge pile of delayed work waiting for you after the move.
6. They guarantee their work. This is one of the most important benefits. If movers break something, they replace it. The same applies to outsourcing your VM migration to experts—they guarantee their work and they don’t stop until it’s done.
7. They don’t have to do the move all at once. OK, so my analogy falls apart a bit (completely?) at this point. Still, imagine a world where you could move one room at a time, getting unpacked and organized before you had to do the next room. That’s what outsourcing lets you do for your workloads. There’s no need to do everything at once. Migrating to the cloud can be an ongoing activity that takes place alongside your regular day-to-day activities.

I hope I’ve convinced you of the value of hiring experts to help with your next cloud migration so you can enjoy an on-time, derisked, end-to-end migration to, or between, AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.

Pythian’s Lift and Shift VM migration service offers a fixed-fee four-step migration plan consisting of:

1. Kick-off and planning: High-level project schedule, list of meetings and assigning of Pythian team.
2. Discovery and design: Interviews, dependency mapping, technical design, rehost migration plan and prioritized backlog of user stories.
3. Workload migration: Environment set up—systems, cloud services, tools and automation scripts—and migration of move groups in sprints.
4. Knowledge transfer: Knowledge transfer session, project review and close-out session.

Even if you’re not ready to migrate immediately, Pythian’s cloud migration planning service helps you plan and visualize your eventual move, so you’re always in an ideal position when “go time” arrives, and the cost/benefit is fully defined and understood.

To learn more about our Lift and Shift VM migration service, please contact us!