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Image: How to successfully navigate your cloud journey

Now more than ever, organizations are migrating workloads to the cloud to realize the benefits of rapidly scaling their business services in order to meet demand.

However, navigating your cloud journey can seem daunting, and it’s important to go in with a well-thought-out plan. By dividing your cloud journey into the three phases of planning, migration and ongoing cloud cost management, you can confidently maintain control.

Planning

Planning is absolutely critical to correctly navigating your cloud journey. This means you need the ability to:

  • Accurately and comprehensively discover all the assets in your technology landscape
  • Assess on-premises apps and services to determine which to migrate
  • Prioritize migration candidates in order to form a plan

This should start with a bottom-up discovery to identify all hardware and software resources and every application and business service those resources support so you have complete visibility of your entire technology landscape. From there, you’ll need to incorporate additional asset details like who owns the asset, how often it’s being used, EOL or EOS dates and more.

Once these details are in place, you’ll have the information needed to determine which apps and services are suitable for migration. You’ll be able to make these decisions based on critical metrics, like effort level, cloud suitability, security and impact concerns, and the total cost of ownership of keeping an app or service on-premises.

After deciding which apps or services you’ll move and the cloud provider these will move to, it’s time for the prioritization phase. Flexera recommends you start with apps and services with low complexity and those that have minimal impact on day-to-day business, such as internal-facing applications.

Migration

When you’re ready to migrate assets, be sure to work closely with application owners. Sharing the intelligence you’ve gained in the planning step will help ensure all affected stakeholders know what to expect. A few tips to keep in mind during the migration phase:

  • Be sure to have technology asset management tools in place to manage cloud-based workloads
  • Use a learn-as-you-go approach to build cloud expertise and skills
  • Migrate workloads in manageable chunks
  • Rightsize applications before moving to the cloud to avoid wasted spend

Ongoing cloud management

Ongoing cloud management starts as soon as you migrate your first workload. To gain maximum benefit from the cost savings cloud offers, it’s important to carefully manage your cloud spend and strive to optimize it. Automated tools like Flexera’s Cloud Cost Optimization can take the heavy lifting out of managing the many costs associated with a multi-cloud environment. Cloud environments change constantly as resources rapidly spin up and down, and you’ll need robust processes or automated tools in place to ensure your tech landscape view is up-to-date and compliant.

Managing a cloud environment can be more challenging than managing an on-premises environment. The Flexera State of the Cloud Report ranks managing cloud spend, security, and lack of resources/expertise as the top enterprise cloud challenges. That’s why it’s critical to put cooperation and collaboration with business units and owners as a top priority. This will ensure that everyone is on the same page, and you don’t encounter excessive governance and compliance challenges.

You’re likely pursuing a cloud journey for one of the main reasons everyone else is—cost savings. However, unless you effectively manage your cloud resources, this move can actually end up with costs spiraling out of control. Wasted cloud spend was estimated at 30 percent by respondents according to the Flexera 2022 Tech Spend Pulse survey. Tools like Flexera’s Cloud Cost Optimization can help you easily identify opportunities to address wasted spend and get the most value out of your cloud journey as possible.

Make your cloud journey a success

To learn more about how you can optimize your journey to the cloud, check out Flexera’s Practical Guide for a Successful Cloud Journey and learn how Flexera’s Cloud Migration and Modernization and Cloud Cost Optimization solutions can help you achieve your cloud journey goals.