The Need for Assurance Solutions in Cloud Migration

Over 50% of the Fortune 500 companies from the year 2000 are now at stake. Which means that just in 2 decades, more than half the brands that were on the Fortune 500 list simply no longer exist. And in many cases, the failure to transform, the failure to adapt to the changing business conditions, is the reason these companies no longer exist.

Now, Cloud enables us to move faster and transform our companies to meet whatever needs that market demands. World is transforming and our business need to transform too if we want to continue to succeed.

Keys for Transformation Success

Understanding the keys for transformation success is imperative and it begins with “why”. Then start small and look for early wins. Focus on cultural transformation and measure your progress. Build a stakeholder campaign and communicate.

Understand who your stakeholders are and who the people are who are making the changes. As we know, greater technologists are not greater communicators. We need to ensure we involve the whole team for transformation success.

Some of the transformation pitfalls include cultural inertia, lack of support from the top, lack of contributor buy-in, lack of sustained support, doing too much at once, and failure to communicate or track the value.

Enterprises find it hard to fully realize the desired outcomes and benefits of their cloud migration journeys. There have been several instances of major business disruptions due to improper cloud migration or its maintenance, as shown below.

The desired business outcomes and typical issues faced from cloud migration include

• Cost Optimization: Right sizing of computing resources and IT infrastructure costs, and conversion of CapEx into Opex. The typical issues faced are significant cost over-runs due to high project complexity, and underestimated performance problems and costs.
• Security: Modernization of IT infrastructure according to best practices and greater application security. The issues include security and compliance lapses due to misconfigured servers, issues at the provider’s end, external attacks, etc.
• Accessibility and Convenience: Central location of applications and services with easy and uninterrupted access, and Improved collaboration among teams. The typical issues faced are unplanned downtime risks due to reliability issues that would hamper the overall experience and image.
• Leverage new technologies: Leverage complex cloud-friendly applications and services across AI / ML, data analytics, data lakes etc. Traditional applications might not be built to take advantage of the cloud and may suffer a performance decline post migration.
• Disaster Recovery: Remote access to systems in a secure virtual environment enables quicker recovery of critical systems in the event of a disaster. There is a risk of data loss during migration which can lead to significant business disruption in the absence of adequate backup.

The top 5 challenges faced during Cloud Migration

A cloud migration journey can present substantial implementation challenges. These risks potentially lower an organization’s ability to achieve some of its critical business outcomes around flexibility, speed and agility (in terms of number and frequency of workloads), cost optimization, customer experience etc. The top 5 challenges include:

1. Downtime: Low levels of reliability; network connectivity issues; and disruptions during live migration.
2. Data loss: Lack of proper data backup; Power outage at data center; and Attack at data center.
3. Security and Compliance: Compliance violations, contractual breaches; Insecure APIs; Misconfigured servers or lapses by CSP; and Malware, external attacks, errors, etc.
4. Inadequate Visibility and Control: Inadequate control over resources handling data centers; Lack of fundamental monitoring capacities; and Lack of alerts to threats.
5. Assessment of technical feasibility: Incompatibility of current IT architecture; vulnerabilities in technology used by CSP; and complexity due to legacy app architecture.

While we’ve seen the top challenges encountered by organizations during their cloud migration journey, it is imperative to understand the focus areas for Assurance solutions.

Assurance – Focus Areas

Stringent and diligent assurance is critical across the entire value chain of the cloud migration journey in order to ensure success.

The focus areas for Assurance solutions are broadly classified into 3 categories: Application, Infrastructure and Data (AID).

The application assurance focus area includes Functional testing, End-to-end business workflows, Workload Integration and business process testing, and Regulatory and Compliance testing.

The Infrastructure focus area covers Integrations, Scalability, Resiliency, Responsiveness, Configuration testing, and Multi-tenant system testing.

The focus area in Data includes validating that all database components have been migrated, Data flow, Data Security, and Security testing.

The testing types based on migration strategy are Baseline Testing, Functional Regression, Performance Testing (load and latency), Stress Testing, Security Testing, Database Testing, and Interoperability Testing.

The typical cloud migration journey is complex by nature as mentioned below –

• Migration of multiple applications, each having a different architecture and infrastructure base, into a unified cloud platform.
• Understanding the technical changes due to the migration to the cloud environment and the related impact on performance.
• Challenges in migration and subsequent performance management of monolithic legacy and proprietary applications.
• Challenges in data access and data migration are based on incompatibility between the place of data storage and the source of access.
• A multi-cloud adoption approach is becoming popular that provides flexibility but poses complexity in implementation and testing.
• Maintaining security, sensitivity, and sovereignty of data (configuration to business and regulatory needs).

Here is the link to access the on-demand webinar that was recently conducted on October 21^st on the challenges in cloud migration and the need for Assurance solutions.

Why Should You Watch the Webinar?

This webinar is for you if you are looking for:

• How to build a cloud migration strategy for an enterprise
• Tips for a successful transformation and the pitfalls to avoid
• Learnings from real-world enterprise migrations involving high-volume products without impacting customers

Drawing from years of experience, Raghuram Krovvidy, President & Global Delivery Head at Cigniti, and Sean D. Mack, Chief Information Officer and CISO at Wiley, have shared their insights on the role of digital assurance in developing a successful cloud migration strategy in this webinar. They have discussed real-world case studies and how you can overcome the challenges of moving enterprise products and services to the cloud without impacting customers.

Who should watch?

QA and IT leaders in enterprises planning a cloud migration or beginning their cloud migration journey will find this webinar insightful.

Conclusion

We’re here to help you through every stage of your digital transformation and help you become the greatest version of yourself. We recognize that successful Digital Transformation entails altering the heart of how a company is conducted, as well as its intricacies. We assist you in overcoming these problems and continually expanding your digital boundaries by focusing on quality and customer service.

Our IP-led digital assurance services platform BlueSwan^TM  enables you to always stay ahead of the curve by predicting and preventing unanticipated application failures, whether it’s foundational changes like implementing a robust digital platform across the enterprise, launching new products and processes, gaining insights into customer engagement, process improvement, and optimization leading to digital excellence. We also provide digital services including intelligent automation, big data analytics, cloud migration assurance, 5G assurance, and customer experience assurance, among other things.

Visit www.cigniti.com to find out more about Cigniti Technologies Limited (NSE: CIGNITITEC, BSE: 534758). We are headquartered in Hyderabad, India, with offices in the USA, U.K., UAE, Australia, Czech Republic, and Singapore.