Cloud

Cloud migration is rarely a simple lift-and-shift. Moving a few services is easy. Moving everything, including the core infrastructure services, is large and complex, so many organisations end up running two-speed IT: a growing cloud estate alongside data centres full of legacy systems their owners are reluctant to move. Paying for both is frustrating and expensive.

Where migrations stall

• Discovery and analysis drag on, and the estate data is still not good enough to plan from.
• Suppliers plan around server counts and move groups that suit their own schedule, not the business.
• The work falls mostly on application teams, not the cloud team, and they still have day jobs.
• A data centre exit is more than applications: network and hosting contracts, DNS and DHCP have to move or end too.

How we work

We have planned and run large migrations to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. We build business cases that stand up, then track spend and benefits through the programme so the case stays honest. Discovery tools only get you so far, so we work with application owners to agree a schedule that meets the exit dates, and with technical teams to deliver it. Our own tools plan, schedule and report on large, multi-year programmes. The aim is a better estate. Moving the same technical debt somewhere new helps no one.

For a FTSE 100 mining company, we ran the programme that closed eleven data centres and moved every application to Azure. Read the case study