Choosing between cloud migration companies
Almost anyone with "cloud migration" in their offering can move a virtual machine. The difference sits in what happens afterwards: who manages it, what it costs per month, and whether you can still go back.
Five questions that make the difference
Put them to every party you speak to, including us. The answers vary more than the quotes do.
- What happens after the migration?A party that only migrates hands over an environment nobody knows. Ask whether the same people do the management, and if not, who takes it over and how they learn it.
- How does the bill become predictable?Cloud cost grows through things that are on and unused. Ask how that is watched and who acts on it — a monthly report without an owner changes nothing.
- What is not coming along?A good proposal names the systems better left where they are, and why. A proposal in which everything moves is a proposal that has not yet looked at the hard cases.
- How do we get out again?Ask about the format of the data, the time it takes to extract and what stays behind. Put the answer in the contract; it is the cheapest insurance in the whole programme.
- Who does the work on site?A migration always has physical work: equipment, connections, the last cabinet. Ask who stands there. In the Netherlands and Belgium that is our own people and not a hired party.
How we approach a migration
Three steps, and the third is the one most often skipped.
Inventory and choose
What runs, what it depends on and what moving it costs. From that follows a decision per system: move, stay, or replace first. That decision is on paper before anything moves.
Move in waves
Start with what carries little risk, learn, and do the next wave better. Moving everything at once is faster on paper and slower in practice, because the first mistake then hits everyone.
Clear up what is left behind
Old servers off, licences cancelled, backups of the old environment closed off properly. This is where the saving in the business case lives, and it is the part that stays undone when nobody claims it.
Further reading
What this connects to.
Questions we get about this
The ones that come up most, answered briefly.
What should you look for when choosing among cloud migration companies?
Mostly at what happens after the migration: who manages it, how the bill stays predictable and how you get out again. Almost anyone can move a workload; the difference sits in the two years afterwards.
Does everything move to the cloud in a migration?
Almost never, and a proposal in which everything moves has not yet looked at the hard cases. We put on paper per system whether it moves, stays or has to be replaced first — before anything moves.
A migration with an exit
Tell us what runs and what prompted this. We come back with what we would move, what we would leave, and what that means per month.
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