The cloud offers organisations a great deal more than virtual machines. However, to harness its full transformational power, organisations need to undertake thorough migration assessments and modernisation journeys guided by experienced partners.

This is according to Digicloud partner Tech Equity, a trusted Google advisory and cloud consulting service.

Eric Kasenge, Tech Equity co-founder, says: “According to Statista, the cloud market in South Africa will reach $4 billion in 2024 and grow to $7.2 billion by 2028, which suggests a momentum that is not slowing down but growing at a compounding rate of 15.88% annually. Adoption is no longer in question, instead organisations of different sizes are looking to take advantage of accelerated innovation, agility, scalability, improved uptime, security and with informed and careful planning, cost savings.”

Fellow co-founder Dr Shiyghan Navti notes that while most organisations are moving to adopt cloud, many are not taking full advantage of it. “Many organisations have been in the cloud for years, but when you look deeper, all they have is a few VMs (virtual machines), and they are not using it in a cloud-native manner. Even where they have migrated and are in the cloud, many just did a lift and shift. The next step should be to optimise the experience – and the value of that is significant. By running typical business applications in a more cloud-native way, they achieve agility and scalability, they gain a more agile development environment and they can do things like DevSecOps and FinOps.”

Navti says: “In the cloud journey, first you take advantage of the infrastructure, then you optimise applications to run better in the cloud, then you modernise the processes.”

Understanding migration assessments

Kasenge says: “Each organisation has a starting point in their adoption of cloud technologies, and the decision to migrate is triggered by various factors. And here, migration could also mean moving from one cloud provider to the other, and not just about moving company IT assets from their own data centre. And in each case, there is a proven framework that helps define the path for execution. The framework aims to address challenges around skills, capacity to absorb change, mitigating risks (across people, process and technology), clarity on costs and the potential return on investment (ROI).

"The change in operating model the use of cloud brings makes it not just an IT initiative, but one that includes business as, ultimately, the benefits are not just realised in IT terms but in improved client experience, better product offerings, efficiencies, better insight for decision-making and the bottom line.”

He says the importance of a thorough cloud migration assessment cannot be understated, as these are key to understanding where the client is starting their cloud migration from and their desired outcomes. “An assessment provides data points for decision-making and execution: an understanding of the desired business outcomes, the new operating model for a cloud-first strategy, required internal skills and enablement, governance, the infrastructure landscape, the applications and their dependencies,” he says.

“In many organisations, there is a tendency to look at cloud migration as a tech project pursuing only cost benefits. A proper assessment across the business enables migration to become a business discussion, looking at how to leverage the capabilities the cloud can unlock for the business, and how to measure the benefits and results.”

Smoother migration with Google Cloud tools

Kasenge explains that it starts with a cloud capability assessment, which aims to capture a holistic view of the client’s starting point in their cloud adoption journey. The next step is a set of discovery workshops to deep dive into the customer’s business, operational and financial strategy and which cloud migration priorities can enable such strategy. The third step is the technical assessment delivered through the Google Cloud Migration Center, which offers the ability to collect the technical inventory of the IT landscape, including resource performance data, which offers insight into the level of utilisation and therefore the opportunity to optimise.

Google Cloud offers a three-step framework that captures over a decade of successful cloud migration experience, as an approach that aims to baseline the client’s business drivers to define a migration plan with a business case across people, process and technology.

Assessment tools within Migration Center include solutions to carry out an initial rapid cost estimate based on data about the IT landscape, automated asset discovery and a high-level fit assessment of potential challenges for different migration journeys.

While several Google Cloud tools are available for free, allowing organisations to undertake their own readiness assessments, the journey is optimised when carried out with experts such as Tech Equity, they note.

Kasenge says the outcomes of the assessment inform the migration strategy, cost optimisation and risk mitigation.

“Understanding the application map offers the opportunity to assess which migration strategy to apply for each application, whether to re-host (aka lift-and-shift), refactor, revise, rebuild or replace (Gartner’s '5 Rs' cloud migration strategy),” he says. “Asset discovery produces infrastructure utilisation data, which uncovers hidden inefficiencies and potential for cost optimisation and savings in the cloud. And an understanding of the landscape helps identify potential challenges and dependencies early on, and therefore minimises migration disruption.”

Navti says: “Google’s heritage is one of global scale and quality, so customers benefit immensely from that. Further, Google Cloud looks to partners like us to complement what it does. At Tech Equity, we look further than the Migration Center. We support migration and then work with the customer in the cloud – for example, building automation blueprints and assets that allow us to optimise and leverage the true benefits of the cloud. These benefits include opportunities to prototype – for example, organisations could build and run a GenAI platform in the cloud in under an hour. We help organisations optimise their cloud environments and maximise ROI over time, while they focus on growing their business.”