For many years, data centers have been the backbone of IT ecosystems for many organizations. However, this landscape is undergoing a sea change with the demands of digital transformation. To keep pace with dynamic market conditions and consumer demands, companies need to be agile, ensure a shorter go-to-market time, and release new technologies faster. As a result, many organizations are now exploring a data center exit strategy to transition to more flexible and scalable cloud-based solutions, enabling them to meet these evolving demands effectively.
Today, according to Gartner nearly 80% of enterprises have shifted from conventional data centers to the cloud. On-premises data centers, with a lifespan of 10 to 15 years, have several limitations and can significantly hamper an organization’s ability to adapt, diversify, and scale. This is one of the primary reasons organizations transition to more agile and scalable cloud infrastructures.
Factors Contributing to a Data Center Exit
Some of the key data center challenges that drive companies to consider data center exit are as follows:
- Lack of scalability: As businesses expand, they need more storage, which becomes difficult with a data center setup.
- Expensive tech upgrades: Managing rapid tech upgrades can be expensive and time-consuming.
- Combating emerging security threats: Data centers have to be continually adapted to emerging threats.
- Regulatory compliance: Meeting regulatory demands is often more manageable through cloud solutions.
- Speed of application delivery: Cloud solutions help to meet geographically distributed demands with agility as compared to data centers.
- Capital intensive: Setting up data centers can be highly capital intensive while maintaining them needs a large pool of resources. Cloud solutions can help companies to reduce capital expenditures and redirect IT resources to innovation rather than maintenance.
Cloud solutions enable businesses to overcome these data center challenges by offering scalable capacity, better geographic reach, and cost-effectiveness through subscription-based models.
Increasing Data Center Expenditure
A data center’s Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) includes expenses related to operations, maintenance, and infrastructure. This covers the original infrastructure investment, ongoing maintenance expenses, upgrades, and the resources required to oversee the entire data center environment.
An in-house data center is expensive to build and maintain. Businesses must pay for dedicated space, energy and utility costs, leases, and the upkeep of software, hardware, and IT infrastructure. Licenses for software and hardware, regular maintenance, upgrades, support, security, and training are additional expenses that increase over time.
Large investments are necessary to ensure that systems, applications, and infrastructure remain scalable and functional, meeting the growing demands of the business. The costs associated with personnel have also increased significantly. Operational risk and financial pressure are increased by the rising expenses of skilled labor as data center settings become more complex, and the knowledge needed to manage them becomes more limited.
Evolving Business Needs
Data centers are primarily designed to serve dedicated objectives and, as a result, are not efficient in handling resource scaling, enhancing application resiliency, and ensuring low latency. In addition, as businesses become increasingly global, the need for distributed workloads, data sovereignty, and navigating local and international regulatory and compliance policies becomes central and difficult to meet with data centers.
Security Concerns
Security is a recurring issue in data centers, with breaches becoming more frequent. To ensure the security of the data stored in a facility, security software and frameworks installed in the on-premises data center are often insufficient. Any data center intrusion can result in the theft of personal information, loss of intellectual property, and sensitive data leaks that can cost millions of dollars. To keep pace with emerging security concerns, data centers must undergo significant upgrades.
Motivation for Cloud Migration
Cloud forms the core of the digital transformation revolution, having transformed the way businesses manage their IT infrastructure today. Almost all modern applications are now created using a “cloud-first” methodology, highlighting its crucial role in fostering innovation.
Moving to the cloud presents a revolutionary opportunity for current workloads. The cloud, as opposed to traditional data centers, enables companies to provide and utilize computing resources as needed, eliminating the need for expensive upfront investments to handle ad-hoc workloads. This represents a significant shift in technology infrastructure investments, offering unmatched flexibility in design, deployment, and cost management. Businesses move to the cloud seeking a variety of benefits in the new business scenario:
Enhanced Cost Efficiency
Cloud platforms enable companies to switch their IT investments from capital expenditures (CapEx) to operating expenditures (OpEx). In addition to avoiding the fixed expenses associated with shared infrastructure, the cloud offers more insight into the actual cost of individual applications. As a result, it significantly reduces innovation costs, allowing for a faster time to market. Additionally, it enhances agility, which in turn reduces innovation costs and accelerates the time-to-market. Small development teams can create global services for audiences worldwide, thanks to the cloud’s scale, performance, dependability, and global reach.
Better Agility
Traditional on-premises infrastructure typically takes weeks or even months to deploy, whereas the cloud enables instant provisioning of IT resources with just a few clicks. Cloud solutions help IT teams eliminate over-provisioning of resources in advance, thereby reducing the need for excessive time spent on infrastructure planning and deployment.
With modern DevOps and the use of infrastructure-as-code within applications, companies can quickly deploy code in a virtual environment with minimal risk, enabling them to innovate rapidly and stay competitive in a dynamic environment.
Superior Service Quality
Our cloud infrastructure is designed specifically to meet the demands of modern and complex workflows. It outperforms conventional on-premises data centers in terms of performance, dependability, and security. The cloud’s robust architecture guarantees that companies can scale easily, run smoothly, and better protect their most important assets.
Leverage New-age Technologies
Cloud solutions enable organizations to explore new cloud-native applications and technologies, such as machine learning, big data, and the Internet of Things, that are not possible or very expensive to deploy with on-premises infrastructure.
Fuel Innovation
By assigning the primary administrative responsibilities to cloud providers, companies can free up their IT resources to focus on core innovation without worrying about maintaining critical infrastructure.
Security and Compliance
Cloud service providers offer comprehensive security at every touchpoint, surpassing the security measures of traditional data centers. Most cloud providers offer built-in security features, including threat intelligence, automatic security updates, analytics, and enterprise-wide security dashboards. They address security issues such as firewalls, load balancing, and automated security to secure systems and infrastructure from vulnerabilities to the latest security threats. Most cloud solutions offer compliance certifications, including ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, AICPA/SOC, and HIPAA.
Data Center Exit Strategy and Moving from On-premises Data Center Operations to the Cloud
Exiting a data center can be a complex and tedious process, as there are many data center exit challenges. Moving from an on-premises data center to the cloud requires a well-thought-out and organized data center exit strategy. Regardless of the complexity of the current data center, moving to the cloud can be challenging and has repercussions unique to an organization. Organizations must address obstacles related to migrating applications and data from data centers to the cloud. Here are some critical data center exit strategies and steps for moving to the cloud:
Create a Robust Business Case and Establish ROI
Creating a business value case is crucial for building a strong foundation for cloud migration, as it involves developing a comprehensive business case that aligns with organizational goals. Organizations must map their existing demands and chart their future roadmap. They must also assess and evaluate your current IT infrastructure to determine how the migration to the cloud will work and what benefits the organization would get from the migration. There should be a clear Return on Investment (ROI) report to articulate the business value, propose the budget, and resource requests with detailed timelines and milestones.
Avoid Common Pitfalls
Errors in data center migrations can result in lost data, decreased end-user productivity, and expensive business downtime. Organizations must back up all critical data and applications with failover and restoration features before migrating to the cloud. IT teams must always have a copy of the backup to correct any mistakes and restore the data to its original state if the migration does not proceed as planned.
Ensure Proper Data Center Planning
Migration success depends on complete readiness, thorough evaluation, and preparation, which can also lower complexity and hazards. When moving, organizations must ensure the use of the appropriate architecture and security best practices. A thorough evaluation of the current data center portfolio, along with the selection of the best cloud platform and an optimal cloud strategy (such as lift-and-shift, refactoring, or re-platforming), would be beneficial. There are additional security concerns, compliance infractions, and external attacks associated with moving the data center to the cloud. IT teams should be able to identify and effectively communicate these risks to their staff.
The Way Forward in Safe Cloud Migration of Legacy Applications
Any change or modification to mission-critical legacy applications poses a risk to the company’s operations and must therefore be thoroughly assessed.
Exiting the data center (DC exit) is a very technical process that requires expertise. Working with migration specialists like Hexaware can help companies effectively navigate both anticipated and unforeseen obstacles when migrating to the cloud. Hexaware maximizes IT operational efficiency, boosts agility, and reduces costs while helping businesses realize and adapt to the digital future. Regardless of the data center’s current infrastructure, Hexaware can assist in simplifying and streamlining the transition to the cloud.
Infrastructure Management Services play a crucial role in ensuring seamless data center exits by strengthening operational efficiency, enhancing security, and enabling scalable IT environments. By leveraging automated tools and expert support, organizations can modernize legacy systems, minimize risks, and streamline cloud migration for improved agility and long-term business resilience.
Hexaware’s Amaze® Migration Platform
Hexaware’s Amaze® migration platform provides an automated methodology for data center migration, offering a well-structured data center exit strategy and approach. It helps discover, assess, migrate, and optimize the cloud migration journey. We offer a free data center assessment, including assessments of physical and virtual servers, and provide recommendations for optimized cloud design. We also provide estimated cloud costs and guidance on migration approaches.
Hexaware can ensure a secure and seamless transition to the cloud. Contact us today for a quick demo of Hexaware’s Amaze®—an enterprise cloud modernization services platform to accelerate your cloud journey today!
