Regardless of the size, many organizations are considering migrating data center workloads to the cloud the top priority. It is also the right time to do so, considering the latest developments in the cloud platforms. As the mantra in the IT landscape has been “survival of the fastest,” organizations are trying to pounce on every business innovation and invention in order to stay relevant. Based on an IDG survey, 77% enterprises have at least one application or a small portion of their IT assets migrated to the cloud. The new era factors in key transformation enablers including agility, technology, security, service, and data to stay ahead of the curve and maintain competitive advantage.

Although, the benefits of cloud are evident, some of the challenges in cloud migration have left quite a few organizations in a soup. There are several factors to consider – performance of applications in a new environment, latency issues, bandwidth constraints, and the management of your environment once it is moved to the cloud. Many organizations are under the notion that cloud migration comes with security risks and data leakage threats. However, in reality, the on-premise infrastructure is much riskier than the cloud. Moreover, the traditional methods to design, develop, and deploy the data infrastructure is time consuming. Here’s where an automation software comes as a boon for organizations that are still skeptic about cloud adoption.

What is Cloud Migration Automation?

With the introduction of automation tools like AWS CloudFormation, Google Cloud Deployment Manager, Microsoft Azure Automation, and several others, cloud migration has become much easier than ever. Organizations can leverage automation software to improve the success of a cloud migration project and reduce the time to value of that investment. Here’s how cloud migration automation can fast forward an organization’s journey to the cloud:

1. Reduce Migration Time

As mentioned earlier, cloud migration was time consuming with the traditional methods of deploying the data infrastructure due to the manual processes involved. Deploying automation in your cloud migration process can significantly reduce the time and human effort involved in migrating the applications, while maintaining the structure and integrity of migrated data. Automation warrants no disruptions and costly overruns to deliver a successful cloud migration project.

2. Lower Migrating Costs

Labor costs make up 50% of the costs in cloud migration projects. With the advent of automation, organizations can skip some of the repetitive tasks needed while migrating their IT assets. This, in turn, reduces costs and expedites the migration process without burdening the in-house staff. Automation in cloud migration can reap you significant benefits across multiple environments to accelerate and simplify the migration process.

3. Support Data Analytics

For many organizations, they discover that their data is stored in separate legacy systems while approaching migration. This calls for a case-by-case analysis due to process inconsistency, compatibility issues, and lack of automation. Moreover, due to the difficulties in the data conversion process, organizations witness higher IT costs and a longer implementation cycle. Automation in cloud migration helps reduce data conversion efforts by 70% to enhance the support in data analytics.

4. Minimize Business Disruption

When organizations consider mass migration in their cloud adoption journey, they need to move and manage large volumes of data and applications without any business disruption. Leveraging automation in cloud migration helps mitigate the impact on business operations and accelerates your cloud migration project.

How to Evaluate Cloud Automation Tools?

Most of your cloud vendors will have some sort of cloud management tool available. Popular platforms including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are also likely to carry a few third-party options with them as well. However, choosing the wrong tool can impact your cloud platform decision big time.

While you evaluate your tools, here are a few things to remember:

Clouds Supported

Your designated platform vendor (AWS, Azure, Google, or Oracle) is only going to focus on developing management tools for their platforms. However, most organizations end up partnering with multiple platform vendors. If your cloud platform does not have a tool that covers multiple platforms, you will need more than one tool and that can complicate cloud management.

Instances Supported

Some tools don’t allow you to deploy only workloads in your cloud and henceforth, decreases the visibility into your cloud resources and increases the complexity of cloud management.

Breadth and Depth of Functionality

Cloud management focuses on 3 main areas: security/compliance, cost, and performance. Some automation tools focus only on one area and you will end up deploying multiple tools to ensure you’ve covered all the bases. Even if one tool covers those bases, it might focus on one area at the expense of others.

Automation

The only right way to figure out the best tool in action is to request for a demo from your service vendor before making a decision. Although, a cloud management tool can help you identify challenges and make right decisions, automation is paramount to exploring the full potential of your cloud investment.

Sign up for a free consultation with us and let us help you with the best automation tool tailor-made for your requirements.

Recommended Blogs:

Cloud Mass Migration: A Shortcut to Faster Business Innovation

How to reduce risks while migrating your data center to the cloud

Cloud Assessment Checklist: A Complete guide to succeed in your Cloud journey

Confused about multi cloud and hybrid cloud? Here’s how you can choose between them