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Chapter 2

Motivations and Benefits of Cloud Migration for Organizations

Every organisation has its different and specific motivations and reasons for considering migration to the cloud. When starting up cloud migration programmes there are always the following motivations:

  • Reducing time to market: many markets are very competitive, so the ability to bring new offers and/or adaptations of offers to market more quickly, and a greater expansion capacity than your competitors are decisive, differentiating factors
  • Optimising costs: Several avenues are regularly exploited:
  • In terms of companies with primary B2C activities, dynamically adapting its capacities according to demand
  • Benefitting, subject to eligibility, from AWS financing, that has an interest in rapidly switching workloads to its infrastructure
  • Modernising the technology more quickly: integrating new technologies (Containerisation, Data Lake Hadoop, Machine Learning, Blockchain) can be secured and accelerated by relying on managed services
  • Facilitating access to international markets: Having the ability to deliver high-performance services in any region of the world (for example, delivering services beyond the “great firewall” in China and obtaining performance compatible with e-commerce activities)
  • Securing IT: capitalising on the expertise and security tools of cloud operators who have best in-class secruity operations and tools.
  • Attracting new talent: the market value of cloud expertise is very important on the market. For new talent, working on these technologies can be motivation and a career accelerator.
  • Controlling a migration schedule: Migration by its systemic and automatic nature allows for scale optimisations e.g. system rationalisation.

In addition, Migrations bring gains that are not always identified during the preliminary phase, and are an opportunity to: 

  • Review application portfolios, and quickly decommission obsolete components 
  • Review infrastructures, identify unused or over-sized resources (approximately 10% to 20% of resources are unused) 
  • Identify, by using the operational teams, the areas that are under control, are at risk, and need to be strengthened 
  • Evaluate the skills available in relation to the skills required to perform migration and operate the migrated applications – this is an opportunity to speed up the teams’ skills development 
  • Migration is an opportunity to industrialise deployments (if this hasn’t already been done), and also make CI/CD chains more reliable