Cloud migration isn’t a one time trip. It’s a gradual migration of data, applications, infrastructure, and business elements to the cloud. It’s also critical, since it requires careful analysis, planning, and execution of a comprehensive strategy that meets your overall business goals.
So, to help you get started with your cloud migration journey and set you up for success, we’ve developed the Google Cloud Adoption Framework.
The Adoption Framework helps your organization identify key cloud adoption activities and objectives to accelerate and de-risk your journey to the cloud. Built on Google’s evolution in the cloud and years of experience helping customers, the Framework helps build a comprehensive roadmap and action plan for accelerating successful cloud adoption. It’s based on four themes that drive success in the cloud:
- Learn continuously
- Lead effectively
- Scale efficiently
- Secure your environment comprehensively
The Google Cloud Adoption Framework is also rooted in our Google Cloud Capability Assessment, which helps you identify where you are in your cloud journey and recommends next steps to move forward.
This assessment will provide you with a view of the fundamental organizational and technical functions you’ll need to be successful across the themes of Learn, Lead, Scale, and Secure, across the three phases of maturity in the cloud:
- Tactical
- Strategic
- Transformational
The Google Cloud Capability Assessment provides you with a set of recommended next steps, best practices, and capabilities your team will need to develop in order to realize value from the cloud.
In the image below, you can see what happens when you move from adopting new technologies ad hoc, to working with them more and more strategically across the organization, going from the Tactical to the Strategic and to the Transformational phase.
How to approach Cloud Migration
We see your cloud migration as a journey with four distinct phases:
- Discover and assess your application landscape
- Plan your move priorities and prepare your foundations
- Migrate your applications and services to the cloud
- Optimize your applications and your operations to save costs and take advantage of cloud-native technologies
At a high level, each of your applications will flow through the journey below.
The path you take for each of your applications will differ depending on your overall strategy for cloud adoption, and the characteristics of the application that you’re trying to migrate. You can aim to become cloud native, or simply lift and shift workloads, based on their desired maturity state.
This is where the Google Cloud Adoption Framework and Cloud Capability Assessment will help you determine the right path for your cloud migration approach. For instance, a large-scale transformation to cloud-native technology will be difficult if your organization is at the tactical level of maturity - where there’s little cloud experience, teams are siloed by function, and applications are generally monolithic.
However, you could get started by doing a lift and shift migration, whilst you’re maturing across the four themes of learn, lead, scale and secure - becoming more agile as an organization, learning new ways of working, and shifting IT to become a value provider to the business. We generally see large organizations lift and shift 70-80% of their workloads initially, focusing their transformation efforts on the areas where they can maximize impact; for example, moving a data warehouse to BigQuery, or refactoring an e-commerce platform for scale.
We know that moving to the cloud is essentially the biggest change across your people, processes, and technology. The Google Cloud team is here to help you every step of the way.
To learn more, check out the following resources:
- The Google Cloud Adoption Framework
- Building a Large-Scale Migration Program with Google Cloud
- The Cloud Capability Assessment: Determine where you are on your cloud journey today, plan your progress, and mature your cloud capabilities.
- The Google Cloud Migration Center: Unified migration platform that helps you accelerate your end-to-end cloud migration journey from your current on-premises environment to Google Cloud.
If you have any questions, please reach out to your Technical Account Manager or leave a comment below and someone from the Google Cloud team or Community will be happy to help!