
The larger the organizational footprint, the more challenging a cloud mitigation will be. Provided are a few tips to help make decommissioning your data center a little easier. Most companies underestimate the time and expense of moving to the cloud. During the transition, organizations can often incur costs from having to maintain both a cloud infrastructure and service stack as well as their legacy, on-premise stack, which can add an additional 20-25 percent to the cost. Therefore, it pays to maximize the time spent in this transitional state. Check out the tips below that will help ensure your enterprise makes a smooth and cost-effective migration to cloud computing.
Get the support of executive leadership
The greatest success occurs when CIOs and other executives make cloud migration a priority and commit to the resources a migration will take. Without strong executive support, transitions can drag on, and the hybrid state gets expensive. When leaders are fully on board from day one, they can focus attention and resources to make a successful move as quickly as possible. This requires the commitment of the entire C-suite, everyone who owns the IT infrastructure and the finance teams supporting them.
Deciding what goes and what stays
There are situations in which you do not need to migrate certain functionality to the cloud. For example: If you have a service you’ve developed in-house and the cloud platform you’re moving to already offers comparable functionality (such as scalability), you do not need to migrate that functionality and can depreciate it once you migrate everything that uses it to the cloud.
It may make sense to keep some services on site. This is usually due to security considerations, potential performance issues or hardware requirements. Most organizations retain some sort of data center, although much reduced. If you have multiple data center rooms, develop a strategy to consolidate on-premise services into as few rooms or racks as possible.
For each service that will move to the cloud, device whether you will “lift and shift” the service as it is, with only the modifications required to run in the cloud, or whether you will re-factor the service completely to take full advantage of cloud capabilities for scalability and resiliency.
Create a migration plan
Finally, once you know what and how you want to migrate to the cloud, develop a migration plan and ensure that your company assigns adequate resources to accomplish the work within the allocated timeline. The plan should address all hardware and services, including their interdependencies and business prioritization.
In most cases, it makes sense to seek help from certified ITAD service providers. Hiring an IT asset disposition company to dispose of your outdated or unused IT equipment saves an enterprise time and money. Previously, ITAD has been an afterthought for so many IT shops, but that is beginning to change thanks to the increasing need for safe and environmentally friendly disposal of data center hardware.
HOBI International, Inc. is a leader in corporate IT asset management since 1992, and has achieved R2 and ISO 14001 certifications at its Batavia, Illinois location and R2 certification at its Dallas and Phoenix facilities. Our disposition services represent best-in-class processes for the IT asset infrastructure. Our data systems offer complete transparency of the disposition process, from removal to final reporting.
HOBI’s IT asset management services include on-site services such as de-installation and removal, data erasure, hard-drive destruction and logistics manager. Our on-site services help to ensure that the IT disposition process is safe. secure and efficient for our clients.