How to Perform a Cost-Effective Google Cloud Migration?

How to perform a cost-effective Google Cloud migration?! What are the most common challenges?

Hello everyone. My name is Ivaylo Dimitrov, Google Cloud Solution Architect at Zelusit and this is our GCP Podcast called “Mastering Google Cloud Made Easy”. Today, I am going to share some insights on how to perform a cost-effective Google Cloud migration, but before we proceed, make sure you subscribe to our channel to stay tuned with our latest GCP insights.

Let me start with a brief overview of today’s episode. First, I will stress on the most common cloud migration challenges. Next, I will pay attention to the most important details you should consider to be successful at your journey.

Overview

Let us look at some numbers. According to a report by Velostrata, over half of cloud migration projects finish behind schedule and over budget. The provider of cloud migration services recently polled over 200 IT professionals around the world for a study. Quizzed about the challenges they faced in moving applications to the cloud, the respondents gave a sense of having had many of their ambitious plans thwarted.

Almost two-thirds reported that their first attempts at migrating to the cloud were either “more difficult than expected” or failed outright. A similar amount said they finished their migrations later than expected, and over half exceeded their budgets to do so.

However, where the cloud projects fail there is not much about the cloud selection, but picking the wrong workloads to migrate and not paying attention to security, governance, and other core business processes.

Important Considerations in a Google Cloud Migration

Every digital transformation needs to balance between security, cost, flexibility, and speed. Public cloud is important to that business imperative, spanning choices ranging from hybrid cloud to “all-in” single cloud and even multi-cloud solutions. Although the public cloud services spend has increased tremendously over the past years, enterprises struggle with basic cloud migration questions such as:

• Where do I begin?
• Should I “lift-and-shift”?
• How will large datasets affect my migration complexity?
• Does my team have the expertise?
• How does this impact my budget?

There is no single right answer. These decisions have a profound and long-term impact on business agility, efficiency, and total cost of ownership. There are 4 phases you need to consider when it comes to cloud migration: Assess, Plan, Migrate, and Optimize.

Google Cloud Migration: Assessment Phase

In the cloud assessment phase, you should ensure you and your team have understood what the cloud migration is to better organize the needed information of interdependencies and to decide what will be migrated. To be successful in cloud migration, firstly it requires a clear awareness of the existing environment. You should know the answers to simple questions such as:

• Where are the applications located?
• What are the bandwidth requirements?
• What is the current resource utilization?
• What are the known problems with the application or environment?
• How should I ensure business continuity?

When you have these answers, you are halfway through.

Google Cloud Migration: Planning Phase

Now, moving to the planning phase. Planning and assessment solutions intelligently rationalize any enterprise’s cloud migration initiatives. It also saves significant time and effort prior to the migration through fully automated application discovery and rationalization. This helps you understand what applications you have, how they are integrated, what issues they have, and how they can be optimized. It also provides ongoing performance monitoring and analysis against business objectives and industry benchmarks.

OK, here is the deal… Prioritize and rank applications prior to migration. When migrating to the public cloud, picking the right sequence to migrate your workloads is critical. It is paramount to a successful migration to understand which workloads should be migrated first, and which workloads will require longer preparation. Also, their dependency and integration mapping are foundational value proposition and core to the business analytics an enterprise should be looking for.

It is crucial to plan the Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment for your move to the cloud. Many on-premises data centers are overprovisioned because there was no large budgetary penalty for doing so. Simply mapping on-premises resources to cloud instances will likely lead to cloud overspend. It is critical to not only properly size your cloud instances based on actual usage to model your cloud costs, but also compare these modeled costs across cloud providers to identify the best value.

Google Cloud Migration: Effective Migration Phase

When all of that is clear and well planned, you can proceed to the actual cloud migration. Things are simple, but the larger an enterprise is, the challenges increase in all aspects: scale of workloads, complexity and interdependencies of multi-tier applications, risk of making sure application uptime and SLAs are met and user disruption is kept minimal.

Minimizing disruption when you migrate to the cloud is crucial to every stakeholder. Thus, having workloads running quickly is hugely beneficial.

Google Cloud’s migration solutions are purpose-built and enterprise grade. They deliver to enterprises a cloud migration journey that both accelerates and de-risks their migration, enabling customers to honor stringent application SLAs regardless of application complexity, statefulness, or size of datasets.

Google’s migration solutions can shave 3 to 5 hours of IT labor per server when migrating. Therefore, IT can perform more migrations in less time, or focus on other IT priorities in parallel.

Executing a cloud migration is not what it was before. Nowadays with migration to Google Cloud the main focus is on system dependency details and stakeholder needs, rather than transforming and moving the workloads.

With the removal of lots of manual effort, Google provides you the right consultancy effort that will guarantee you a seamless cloud migration process and better Return on Cloud Investment.

Google Cloud Migration: Cloud Cost Optimization

Once the migration is complete, it is highly recommended to go back, review, and optimize the cloud solution. Post-migration rightsizing is something that I personally always do and advise our clients to do it. There are many GCP features that can help you save some costs, such as Cost-trends and forecasting, Intelligent insights for smart spending, sustained-use discounts and more. All to help you to get better ROI.

Conclusion

Let me wrap it up. You need to balance between flexibility, security, costs, and speed. Make sure you have all cloud migration phases backed by clear understanding of what needs to be migrated and what are the expected outcomes. Make sure all the risks are well known to the stakeholders and well measured. You can check out my article on Google Cloud migration approaches at our website or chat with me about migrations. I would be happy to support you in your cloud migration journey.

Well, that’s all for today’s episode of “Mastering Google Cloud Made Easy”. Thank you for joining and I hope you will keep these important considerations in mind to help perform a seamless and cost-effective Google Cloud migration.

Make sure you subscribe to our channel to always stay tuned with the latest insights we share. Join us next time to understand the benefits of uniting Data Lakes and Data Warehouses in the cloud. Goodbye. See you next time.