Full cloud transformations require a very structured methodology and processes for transforming an organization’s application landscape, typically by refactoring and/or rearchitecting applications to be migrated. These approaches put the cloud months or even years away, delaying cloud benefits and making them hard to reach for small and medium-sized businesses.

Reach cloud benefits faster, without disrupting your business

There is a well-known standardized model for migrating the applications to the cloud that is known as the 6 Rs:​ Replatform, Refactor, Replace, Rehost, Retain and Retire.

In addition to those, there is luckily the seventh “R” Relocate that strikes a balance, reaching meaningful cloud benefits at a reasonable speed without creating disruptions to business. This method tremendously speeds up cloud journeys. It decouples business transformation from technology transformation, thus allowing organizations to get cloud benefits from new technologies, without forcing businesses to change at the same time. Check out the video below where Onni Rautanen explains this in more detail.

When relocating, apps and workloads are moved from data centers to the cloud as they are, without redesigning the apps – meaning migration can be done with almost no business disruption. Once applications are in a cloud-like environment, businesses immediately see some of the key cloud benefits: fast provisioning, API-driven automation, security by design, and improved business continuity, along with the obvious benefit of shortened lead-time to cloud.

Avoid interference to business when relocating to the cloud

An important factor in avoiding business disruptions when performing cloud migrations is to maintain the as-is situation in terms of security requirements and data sovereignty. Hybrid Cloud, as a destination, allows you to keep your on-prem workloads on-prem, thus avoiding any issues from a data security point of view.

COVID-19 has shown organizations that they need to be able to respond fast when they change their IT solutions to adapt to new business needs. In this context, relocating becomes a good option whenever scalability and accessibility from distributed locations need to be un-leashed quickly to users.

So, what’s the story with "Relocate"?

A new generation of tools from VMware literally expands your current environments into the Hybrid cloud and allows you to perform large-scale migrations of virtual machines (VM) with close to zero downtime for your application in the best of cases. This can dramatically increase the speed of migrations to the cloud. 

Hybrid Cloud environments, where the private and public environments are on feature parity levels, are also a necessary enabler for low-risk and speedy cloud transformations. Specifically, they allow you to keep your on-prem setup on-prem, but with the above-mentioned cloud benefits.

Having a new toolset is, however, not enough. Before virtual machines can be moved to the cloud, application dependencies between other VMs, applications, and services must be understood. A single virtual machine might be communicating with many other virtual machines and services. Thus, there could be a variety of consequences if we migrate only a portion of the application stack. Furthermore, egress traffic could incur additional costs that weren’t accounted for, and many other impacts connected with application dependencies need to be carefully planned to avoid business disruption. This is why you need a partner with proven experience in application migration execution to conduct a successful relocation without business disruption.

Today, new technologies and strong partnerships with service providers can simplify the adoption of cloud solutions and enable swift migrations. This makes the Relocate method a no-brainer for organizations seeking to reap cloud benefits straightaway.

A cloud shortcut, but not short on cloud benefits

Full cloud transformations are still essential for some organizations, but a quick relocation can deliver cloud benefits much faster than before. Once workloads are relocated to the cloud, organizations can then move forward with full cloud-based application transformations at their own pace. Application refactoring and rearchitecting can happen after critical cloud benefits are unlocked, while organizations already benefit from using a single cloud operating model across all platforms and locations.

The partnership between TietoEVRY and VMware makes the "Relocate" track widely available by offering a ready-to-use Hybrid Cloud IaaS platform as your Cloud destination, coupled with simple and non-disruptive migration tools and processes.

Contact us to speed up your cloud transformation.