vExpert's recommendations on Hybrid Cloud Migrations

We just released the results of the first-of-a-kind Survey Panel with vExperts on the state of the Hybrid Cloud initiative. The Survey is focused on Hybrid Cloud Migration and Monitoring challenges and techniques. The survey results reveal the realities of the challenges with migrating to the Hybrid World. While a few of the organizations take the advantage of automated Application Dependency Mapping solutions for pre-migration assessments, most experts feel that there is tremendous needed here as most organizations continue to rely on error-prone and time-consuming manual methods. The vExperts make a strong recommendation that no organization that is serious about a successful Hybrid Cloud transformation, should try to do this manually. 

The vExperts on this survey panel provided their feedback based on their own experience and observation in their own Enterprise SI/MSP organization or as a consultant for the above organizations. Most of the vExperts are primarily in the Architect Role, who have the responsibility of providing the direction to the IT team for new business services or initiatives that will help the organization in its business transformation.

vExpert Survey Panel Key Findings

The growth of Hybrid Cloud

• Almost 70% of the panelists consider Hybrid Cloud as business critical.
• At least 60%+ of the panelists feel organizations will be in Hybrid mode vs pure play private or public cloud.
• Pure-play Private Cloud is not dead  and 18% of panelist feel organization will stick to it. According to Uila, the reasons will vary from vertical needs to security and compliance issues due to usingapplications that cannot be migrated or recently reported public cloud outages. 

Most organizations will go through an iterative Migration process which calls for piece by piece migration within the application dependencies, as roll-back options are available, making them less risky.

• 72% of the panelists feel organizations will go through or must go through an iterative approach instead of a single big-bang migration effort.
• The Top 3 concerns with migrations include security and compliance concerns as expected, but the big “ah-ha” inclusion is the knowledge of the applications interdependencies (Service Mapping) that is critical to planning migration.
• More than 70% of panelists said that they are seeing organizations take the opportunity to clean house and reduce their technical debt during the move. This makes it very critical for organizations to understand the dependencies for any asset to be retired to avoid surprises.

Planning Hybrid Cloud Projects takes time and is hard if done manually. But it does not have to be done that way.

• 65% say it could take months to years based on the current scale; Any undertakings to shorten this must be seriously considered
• 80%+ of the panelists strongly suggest that knowing the Application interdependencies is critically important for pre-migration assessments.
• Panelists feel 2 out 3 organizations are trying to build the Application dependency mapping manually, which is error prone and time-consuming and majority of them (45%) would not recommend doing this manually.

For detailed results and other findings, please download the vExpert Survey results from here.