In recent years, cloud computing has established itself as a leader in the digital transformation strategies of companies around the world. In fact, Canalys estimates that company spending on cloud infrastructures will increase by 23% worldwide and will reach 80,000 million dollars this year and IDC data indicates that the Spanish cloud market will reach an annual growth rate of 21. 9% between 2021 and 2025, which means exceeding 5,000 million euros in turnover.
The digital transition towards a cloud-based model is something common for companies thanks to its multiple benefits in productivity and efficiency. However, cloud migration is still a process that involves a certain degree of complexity regardless of the type of access to the cloud and, in fact, this is placed first among the reasons why some companies have not taken the step still with 37%, followed by cost (34%) and security (32%), according to data from Unit4. Therefore, in order to create a successful migration plan, it is essential to understand the level of difficulty, since it is from then on that the company can draw up the implementation strategy. In this sense, atSystems, has identified five indicators that will help companies to understand the complexity in the cloud migration process.
Number of products and users per product
When performing cloud migration, one of the main things to take into account is the number of applications to be migrated, as well as the number of users for each of them.
Thus, a small migration to the cloud will be much easier to perform and less expensive than a migration of a considerable number of applications. Before beginning the process, it is recommended to debug those applications that are not critical to the company or that are not being used. The same occurs when the number of users to migrate is high, since it directly affects the estimated time of migration.
Volumetrics and data size
The number of users and applications to migrate will in turn affect the size of the data and the migration and, therefore, it will be slower and more complex depending on the space occupied by the information.
This volume of data comes from different sources, such as the projects themselves, source code repositories, collaborative work spaces, configuration management databases, attachments, among others.
On-premise product versions
Another factor to take into account is the version of the products that the company works with at the time. Although everything will depend on the application to be migrated, most of the time it will be necessary to have the versions updated in order to successfully migrate to the Cloud.
Commercial and custom-developed plugins
The number of plugins to migrate is another factor that will determine the degree of complexity, but also their degree of use and importance for the company itself. In this sense, it may be that some of the plugins do not exist in the cloud environment or that there are alternatives, or that the company has custom-developed plugins.
For this reason, and once again, it will be important to evaluate their compatibility with the cloud objective of the migration. There are cases such as Netflix, which in just over 7 years was able to become a cloud-native company both by migrating some of its systems and by building new ones, which allowed them to expand in 130 countries as of 2016.
Integrations with other tools
Integrations between tools are one of the main challenges for 40% of companies, according to a 2022 Mulesoft and Deloitte report. But, in the case of the cloud, it is not only important that applications are compatible with the cloud instance to which the migration is going to take place, but it will also be necessary to identify whether other outbound and inbound tools that the company works with outside the cloud can be integrated with the rest of the ecosystem, always to the extent necessary. Some of these applications can be the corporate user directory or the SSO, external database fields or external clients that connect with the API, therefore, in addition, if the company has many of these tools, the process of migration increases in complexity.
