Your organization might be migrating workloads to the cloud for scale, agility or cost efficiencies. But whether you’re ‘lifting and shifting’ a workload to the cloud, or ‘improving and moving’ by optimizing that workload before you move it, migration should be considered a first step in a broader effort to modernize workloads.
Migration allows you to reassess how you apply technology to solve a particular problem. Perhaps the goal is to increase agility. But agility isn’t just about rapidly developing and launching applications; it’s about the ability to break down silos and inefficiencies—from conception to execution.
That means considering what happens after the migration. For example, what are you doing with your data once it’s in the cloud? And how are you gaining business value from that data?
Google Cloud is known for its strength in complex cloud environments, offering advanced capabilities such as machine learning and next-gen analytics. Beyond migration, how can you turn your cloud solution into a source of insight and boost speed to innovation by tapping into analytics and creating a foundation for a broader enterprise data platform?
Creating a foundation for modernization
According to IDC’s Cloud Pulse, enterprises are turning to the public cloud to boost innovation and delivery of digital products—with CRM, ERM and SCM topping the list of most critical workloads over the next two years.
Many organizations have already lifted and shifted their simpler legacy workloads onto the cloud with few material changes. What’s left are often critical workloads, virtual machines and data warehouses, which can be complex, expensive and difficult to migrate and modernize.
For example, lifting and shifting Oracle or SAP data workloads or open-source relational databases to the cloud is complex and usually difficult. You might choose to refactor (optimize the existing code), re-platform (migrate to a new platform with only minimal changes to the code) or re-architect (alter the code to a new application architecture).
You’ll need to consider how to modernize those complex workloads for the cloud (including integration issues) and what new capabilities you can leverage once they’re in the cloud. Since each workload’s modernization strategy will have a different evolution, you’ll also need to determine the technical difficulty of modernization and create a roadmap that includes future state architecture, risk, timelines and estimated cloud consumption costs.
Leveraging cloud capabilities for innovation
Without the right strategy, enterprises won’t be able to fully benefit from cloud capabilities such as advanced analytics built into Google Cloud. For example, it may require repurposing or re-platforming on-premise database workloads to Google Cloud services such as Google BigQuery, Google CloudSQL (PostgreSQL/MySQL) and Google Cloud Spanner, or re-homing these workloads as an interim step on Google Bare Metal Solution.
At the same time, cloud modernization isn’t a one-time project; it’s an ongoing journey. And different workloads require different approaches to migration and modernization, so there’s no cookie-cutter approach. Whether you refactor, re-platform or re-architect, Pythian can help your team take ownership of this effort and set you up for success on your modernization journey.
Our Cloud Modernization for GCP is a comprehensive offering that enhances your infrastructure and operations, enabling you to take advantage of the flexibility and range of new possibilities cloud environments offer.
This business-critical infrastructure platform can act as a foundation for additional improvements in modernization, such as replacing on-premise hardware solutions, building automation and/or consolidating the infrastructure footprint. We can also help update the infrastructure, architecture and features of existing cloud environments or platforms to adopt best practices and set the stage for rapid digital product development.
Why Pythian?
Beyond moving to the cloud, modernization is about driving ongoing business value through leveraging new cloud capabilities. Pythian can help streamline your modernization by providing relationship-based consulting combined with end-to-end delivery and support capabilities to help you better manage costs and risk, augment your in-house IT skills and modernize your applications to realize the advantages of a modern cloud environment.
To find out more about how Cloud Modernization for GCP can work for you, email us at info@pythian.com to get started.
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