Why do you need to exit Data Centers? How to avoid the common pitfalls?

In today’s volatile technological landscape, enterprises need to be at the top of the ladder by becoming more agile and efficient to remain competitive in this digital era. Traditional data center models have significant multi-year Capex commitments, outdated or bloated infrastructure, and a heavy operational footprint. This impacts the organization from both the operational inefficiency and business agility perspective. The problem is compounded when there is an impending recession, and an organization will need to do more with fewer financial and operational commitments. In the last few years, there is already an upsurge in the adoption of cloud infrastructure (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) due to the cost-benefit (Opex) that it offers, compared to on-premises infrastructure in data centers.

Here are a few reasons why organizations decide to pivot from on-premises data centers and migrate them to the cloud environment:

Operational Efficiency

• Aging Data Center Setup and End-of-Life Assets
  Organizations have IT Assets (Infrastructure, Applications, and Data) that have been acquired over the last 10 to 20 years and are now nearing end-of-life support or compliance. Even after being heavily depreciated, these assets become significantly expensive to maintain with recurring upgrades and multi-year commitment renewal. There is also a cybersecurity risk as all end-of-life infrastructure, apps, and storage is not up to the latest security standards, making them vulnerable to cyber-attacks. In the past, organizations have lost up to $3Bn in market value by having one security breach. Cloud provides a way to end this 5 to 10 years renewal commitment cycle while updating the organization-wide security posture.
• Upcoming Data Center Renewal or Lease: Reduce Operations and Maintenance Spend
  Organizations evaluate the cost and technology benefits that cloud infrastructure migration offers over traditional data center renewals with several years of commitment. Having a hybrid cloud strategy here helps release data centers that can be consolidated to the public/private cloud while eliminating significant operations and maintenance expenses that organizations spend today on managing the data centers.
• Merger or Acquisition: Consolidate & Rationalize on Cloud
  In mergers or acquisitions, taking an expensive data center spend off your IT budget might be necessary for corporate collaboration, avoiding infrastructure redundancy, and increasing productivity.

Business Agility

• Upgrading to Agile and Competitive Solutions
  With on-demand services available, like IaaS, PaaS, CaaS, SaaS, or FaaS, it’s easy to move from ideation to implementation at scale with lesser effort and monetary commitment.
• Better Redundancy and Security
  The cloud environment provides better uptime SLAs and is more secure as it adheres to rigorous information security standards at a lesser cost when compared to an on-premises data center.
• Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Strategy
  The cloud provides better backup, high availability, data visibility, regular backups, and data monitoring features.

Pitfalls to avoid on your Data Center Exit Journey

• Taking a manual approach for in-depth analysis of tightly coupled and decades-old IT Infrastructure systems to understand the complexities. There are over 80 variable data points like age of infra, cloud readiness, storage needs, app complexity, data dependency, network topology, etc. A manual approach is extremely error-prone in building this plan.
• Not securing the time of SMEs or shortage of skills to support the cloud migration planning & execution creates setbacks as these are sources of some of the decision-making during migration.
• Using traditional IT support and Ops partners to support the hybrid cloud journey. Traditional IT Ops system integrators haven’t been agile in bringing the right platform and product-related agile mindset required for a hybrid cloud move.
• Waiting for a perfect plan is a common pitfall, the cloud is a journey, and the plan should be indicative so that there is an option to course-correct while migrating.
• Improper cost, effort, and risk estimation while planning the DC exit and not adhering to stringent timelines lead to financial and business impact.
• Lack of synchronization and data loss while transferring large data sets from on-premises data center to cloud.
• Lack of a highly skilled team to handle complexities and unexpected issues during migration and take real-time decisions.

To tackle all the major challenges stated above and help enterprises in their cloud adoption without risks, Hexaware’s cloud modernization platform amaze^® for infrastructure acts as a catalyst and leverages automation to accelerate the DC exit journey. It understands that there is no one size fits all solution for cloud migration and that each organization has unique data center migration challenges to be addressed. Amaze^®’s cloud adoption framework is built on industry best practices and translates the customer’s cloud transformation goals into a well-structured actionable plan through a higher level of automation in each step. Amaze^® provides an appropriate roadmap for the DC exit with its three-point strategy:

• Automated Assessment & Sizing Plan
• Readiness & Build
• Migration & Validation

The focus of amaze^®’s readily available cloud templates helps to bridge the gap between the enterprise’s current and desired future state. Irrespective of the complexity, amaze^® helps customers overcome organization-specific challenges in migrating applications, data, and infrastructure from on-premises data centers to the cloud.

To learn more about our amaze^®-led cloud transformation approach, visit our business page.