FINAL WORD
STAYING AGILE AND
ENABLING SECURE AND EFFICIENT
REMOTE WORKING SHOULD BE THE
TOP OF EVERY CIO’S PRIORITIES. “1. Keep everyone in the know
lot more likely to trust someone they have
met in person, so businesses should be using
this to their advantage.
4. Test everything
Whether it be migration scripts, run book
actions, virtual machine failovers or even just
testing that conference bridges work, there is
no such thing as enough testing.
Information and education is a key part
of confidence building. Activities such as
running workshops with key stakeholders,
providing training, producing accurate
documentation, or the project team
simply being available to answer queries,
are invaluable.
This is an ongoing process throughout the
migration as you must appreciate that the
customer is probably not going to remember
a demo, or the new service request process
that was explained in week one while
they are mid-way through an aggressive
migration schedule.
It’s likely that someone senior within the
business has put their neck on the line for the
migration to occur, so ensuring this person
has clear and regular updates will mean
they are more likely to fight your corner if
the going gets tough. Some of the most
successful deliveries we have seen included
live migration tracking stats on TVs around
the head office or daily PowerBI reports
delivered up to the senior management
team showing progress.
2. Assess and plan in detail
The migration team and customer will
feel significantly more confident if they
fully understand the source environment,
the migration process and the target
state. Building a detailed map of the
current environment will help formulate
interdependencies which can then be used
for post-migration testing.
It sounds simple, but a lack of understanding
about the platform will mean surprises
during a cutover – normally bad ones.
What better way to boost confidence than
by using this assessment information to
create detailed migration run books for each
application where everyone understands
how the app is put together, how it is being
Geoff Barlow, Cloud Architect at Node4
moved and how it can be rolled back? Again,
if they are being sponsored by someone
in the business, this assessment process
will give them a lot of confidence that the
business has done its homework.
3. Stay connected
Speaking from a service provider perspective,
getting the solutions architects, service
delivery staff and technical engineers from
both businesses together on a regular basis,
before and during migration activities, will
massively help build confidence.
When the business can establish these
relationships pairings it will find that the
inevitable blips can be discussed a lot more
easily, as it’s not just the other side of a
screen they are talking to. This is particularly
imperative in the current lockdown climate
where all members of the business are likely
to be working remotely.
Organisations running a migration internally
will likely need to stay close to their
application owners, service desk users or
other department heads they are about to
request some downtime from. People are a
After any test, IT teams must make sure
to introduce feedback loops and review
why things failed and what was a success.
Organisations might have used the
migration method many times before but
fail to remember that they are potentially
dealing with people who only see that their
critical application is about to get taken
down. So rather than rely on trust, businesses
should use evidence of testing and repetition
to drive confidence up.
It’s common to uncover issues during
failover tests, which is a good thing.
Problems discovered during testing are
much better than those discovered in the
real situation, as it helps to reinforce that
the process was worthwhile and means
there is time to resolve and test again
before it really matters.
5. Start with an easy win
If businesses can demonstrate that a key
application can be migrated simply and
quickly, this is going to do a lot for ongoing
confidence during a migration project.
They shouldn’t pick monolithic shoestring
application or the 20-year-old server in the
cupboard as a first migration target.
Instead, it is wise to choose something
small but significant that will give
everyone some reassurance that it’s rinse
and repeat from there on. The process
should have been tested fully by this point,
but getting a production service over the
line demonstrates a milestone and should
be celebrated.
With the landscape evolving every day that
passes, staying agile and enabling secure and
efficient remote working should be the top of
every CIO’s priorities. Moving to the cloud is
a sure-fire way to achieve this flexibility and
migrating to the cloud needn’t be a headache
if you follow the right steps. •
86 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com