Research has found that 45% of organisations that perform opted for a lift-and-shift migration will overspend by 70% during the first 18 months of their new architecture. Flip that around – almost half of the newly migrated organisations could have spent 30% of what they paid. Not for one year’s budget but ut for one and a half. They were over-provisioned by as much as 55% because they lifted and shifted and because they signed up for a subscription plan.
Migrating to the cloud gives agencies a tremendous opportunity to streamline their architecture, improve efficiency and only pay for what they use. But many miss the opportunity because this approach only works if government IT pros work to avoid common pitfalls – like overspending and over-provisioning – in the process.
To have a successful migration, here are some critical framings to consider:
Gain efficiency while migrating
Buying a system once creates a sunk cost. Inevitably, that makes it easy to think of its day-to-day operation as something already paid for. Some days, solutions handle less work than their able to. Other days, they’re pushed to their limits. Both approaches cost the same thing.
However, when migrating to a cloud system, the same mindset can lead to costly traps. Paying for clouds services allows agencies to save in times of light demand and pay to scale up only as necessary. To do this well, they must improve before they move. Rather than lifting everything and shifting it to the cloud at once, agencies must rearchitect their infrastructure to gain efficiency as they move.
Right-size virtual infrastructure
Much of the advantage of virtual infrastructure comes from its scalability. That means agencies have to scale it for it to work its magic. This requires the judicious application of rightsizing — adding resources where they’re needed and moving them when they’re not fully utilised. An effective virtualisation manager helps agencies pay for the infrastructure they need rather than overpaying for what they don’t.
Understand the baselines of existing on-premises systems
Lastly, agencies need to get an accurate baseline of what their on-premises systems do now and what they’ll be asked to do in a year or two. Perhaps the most telling part of the Gartner study is the 18-month time frame. Learning as you go is expensive. If those organisations had looked at their historical baselines to understand better how to forecast their growth, they might not have been stuck overpaying by 70%.
Avoid common pitfalls
Adopting these practices can help federal IT pros better optimise their applications or systems before a cloud migration and avoid common pitfalls, including overspending and over-provisioning. Most agencies probably don’t need the biggest car all the time, they just need a vehicle that works for their purposes and gets them where they need to be in the most efficient way possible.
As reported by OpenGov Asia, A report titled “Government Cloud Platforms 2021–2022 RadarView” evaluated 15 providers based on product maturity, enterprise adaptability and future readiness. The report identifies four trends that are shaping the market. The first is the increasing compliance needs that are accelerating the shift to the cloud. The cloud helps agencies address sensitive workloads, such as those involving health care data while complying with requirements.
State and local governments are increasingly adopting cloud to lower IT and licensing costs. Cloud can help city councils manage and organise resources and foster communication and collaboration. It can help them securely store, analyse and process sensitive economic data, and they can more easily capture and process data from the internet of things and edge computing.
