What should a cloud migration strategy look like in 2022?

We’ve been talking about cloud computing for the best part of two decades – so why is it that many businesses still aren’t sure whether they should be using the cloud or what the best cloud strategies might be for their business? The Grant McGregor team assesses the state of cloud migration in 2022.

The rush to remote working during the pandemic lockdowns suddenly brought the sales pitches of cloud vendors to the front and centre of every organisation’s thinking.

We need to… be more agile… be able to work from anywhere… flexibly scale up and down resources in line with business need…

Cloud migration strategies in 2022

Those organisations which had already made some movement cloud-ward pre-pandemic found the shift to remote working much easier to manage.

Today, as many organisations struggle to define their own “new normal” and to find the right balance between remote, on-premises and hybrid working, the flexibility and agility of cloud seems to be even more desirable.

Clearly your own strategy for cloud adoption will depend very much on your own organisational starting point – some organisations have already migrated many of their workloads into the cloud. What we seek to do in this article, then, is to chart a general path or direction for cloud migration which you can follow from wherever your starting point is.

Where cloud migration strategies will differ most, however, is in terms of the size of the organisation and the complexity of IT systems used. For this reason, we have charted two different paths for you to consider: one for small and medium-sized businesses and another for large and fast-growing organisations.

A cloud migration strategy for small and mid-size organisations

The starting point for any cloud journey should be to get your day-to-day business apps into a secure cloud environment. For most organisations, this means implementing Microsoft 365.

This offers several advantages; the key one being there is no need to run servers on premises for your email and other Microsoft app workloads. As well as knowing those workloads will be running in high-performing datacentres, switching to Microsoft 365 and Teams hosted in the Azure cloud means that you have access to all of Microsoft’s security tools at your disposal to protect those workloads.

For staff, accessing mail and other services without having to log on to your VPN makes working from home easier – and will save your organisation money too (VPNs don’t come cheap). For the best results, pair with Microsoft Surface devices. The tight integration between the device and Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 makes things really easy for staff and the ease of device management with Microsoft Intune and Autopilot simplifies IT administration while improving remote device security.

As soon as you move any workloads into the cloud, you need to ensure you have a good cloud back-up solution in place. Don’t just rely on the standard solutions. If you are in any doubt at all, speak to an expert to make sure your backups are right for your organisational needs.

We also recommend cloud storage via Microsoft SharePoint. It’s the easy way to move files into a secure cloud environment so that your teams can share files, data, news and resources.

However, SharePoint is more than cloud file storage. You can use SharePoint to build cohesion and inform your employees throughout your intranet and to drive organisational efficiency by sharing common resources and applications on home sites and portals. Plus, using SharePoint opens up opportunities to use lists and libraries, Power Automate and Power Apps.

Power Apps would be our next recommendation. Power Apps is Microsoft’s no-code development platform which enables staff with little to no coding experience to design and develop apps that can be used across your business.

For small and mid-size businesses using Power Apps with a SharePoint backend is more than adequate. However, for large businesses and businesses that have a fast growth trajectory, you’ll need a different approach (which we’ll outline in the next section).

Many organisations have implemented some of these tools during the pandemic lockdowns to enable remote working. Now the hard work begins to understand the benefits they can deliver for your people and how to best exploit them throughout your organisation.

If you’d like advice or help to understand the possibilities or maximise the benefits, please reach out to our team.

A cloud migration strategy for large and fast-growing organisations

Larger organisations may often be further on in their cloud migration journey – but this is not always the case. We’d, therefore, begin this section by also recommending a migration to cloud-based office and productivity apps and, specifically, Microsoft 365 (with the right backups in place!). This is the easiest and lowest hanging fruit.

For larger organisations, SharePoint isn’t the complete answer for file or data storage. It’s great to leverage for the collaboration piece and for your Intranet, but it’s likely you’ll need to supplement it with Azure storage.

Furthermore, if you want to take advantage of tools such as Power Automate and Power App, you’ll need more than SharePoint for the backend. SharePoint is great to test out the concept – could these tools be used in your organisation? However, once you get going, you’re going to want something more substantial. This is where Microsoft Dataverse comes in.

Microsoft Dataverse is the secure way to store and manage data that’s used by business applications. Dataverse includes a base set of standard tables that cover typical scenarios, but you can also create custom tables specific to your organisation and populate them with data by using Power Query. App makers can then use Power Apps to build rich applications that use (and add to) this data.

Dataverse runs on Azure, so you benefit from all the security and accessibility and flexibility that brings.

You’ll probably want to access those same benefits of security, accessibility and flexibility for your other business applications. For most people, this means a “lift and shift” approach: retiring your old on-premises servers and moving those into VMs in the Azure cloud.

However, we’d advocate taking a strategic look at what you are running where and why before moving anything across. To get the real benefits of cloud – and we’re talking cost efficiencies here – you want to minimise your workloads.

Carefully consider what you really need. Look at all the dependencies (and plan any migration accordingly!). Consider what might need upgrading as part of a migration. If you’re using SAP, for example, Microsoft has specific tools to help with hosting your SAP workloads in the cloud (as this case study of McLaren’s cloud migration(1) illustrates).

If you have bespoke tools and business apps, you’ll need to consider, also, what might be rebuilt as a cloud-native application. Usually, cloud native applications will consume far less resources so you can keep running costs to a minimum.

Once you’ve moved your business apps into the cloud, it’s time to start thinking about how to extract maximum value from that data. It's likely that you’ll also want to store additional data in a way that frees it up to be used across the business – and for that you might want to consider an Azure Data Lake. Consider this possibility within your larger cloud migration strategy.

This brings us back round to the Power Platform. As well as leveraging Power Automate and Power Apps, you can use Power BI to present the key information held in Microsoft Dataverse, your Azure Data Lake or a myriad of other business apps to individual users across the business in flexible reports and graphical dashboards.

Finally, it’s important to ensure that you have the right cloud-to-cloud backup solutions in place across all of your cloud infrastructure.

Got questions?

If you have questions about any of the tools or topics discussed in this article, please reach out to our team.

You can reach us on: 0808 164 4142

Further cloudy reading:

How can you optimise your cloud and digitalisation initiatives? Read our thoughts here.

Plus: our beginners guide to cloud security.

And: cloud 101 – what is meant by SaaS, PaaS and IaaS?

Sources:

1. https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/1518589930089599921-mclaren