Data Center Migration Assessment: Assessing Future Needs

For many companies a data center migration means taking advantage of new cost structures and capabilities to support teams. Simply replicating your current environment isn’t going to achieve these goals, whatever your choice of location (on-prem, cloud or hybrid. For example fewer companies are managing a lift and shift approach to the cloud today, partly because the shifted applications can’t take advantage of cloud-born features, but also because you don’t want to pay for what you don’t need going forward.

If you’re contemplating a data center migration, ask yourself:

• Will planning your data center migration based on past business needs meet future requirements?
• Could you be overestimating resource needs, which leads to higher data center costs, If you don’t right size your estate ahead of the move?
• If moving to the cloud, will you be able to fully take advantage of cloud-native features?
• Do any industry regulations require that you treat some data differently than others – and could mean you risk a fine if moved off-prem?

However confident you are, there’s always a possibility that something will be missed, making a comprehensive assessment vital to your migration success. Within that, you’ll need to assess your business needs, both now and in the future, and understand what aspects of your IT estate you can eliminate, archive, or consolidate ahead of your move.

Application rationalization: This is a good time to identify the apps you are supporting and understand if any can be rationalized. Over time the company may have undergone M&As and the number of applications you support will have expanded. Additionally, growth in Shadow IT could mean that users are accessing applications in the cloud without you being aware. Talk to teams to understand their needs and assess them against the apps you support to make decisions on your estate moving forward.

Assess future needs: Have you considered the future business needs of teams? What do you want from your new data center environment? Talk to business teams and leaders to find out more and identify the equipment and space you’ll need if consolidating data on-prem or moving to a co-location center. If you’re moving to the cloud assess needs against available providers’ offerings and capabilities to understand which is/are a good fit.

Understand regulatory requirements: If data handling regulations for your industry mean that some applications and workloads must remain on prem, a lift-and-shift move will not only see you leveraging cloud resources you don’t need, but also creating risks that could lead to potential fines. If your goal is to migrate to the cloud or a co-location center, work with legal, business teams, and others to identify what you can migrate and what must stay on prem.

Gathering knowledge using automation

A comprehensive needs analysis requires an accurate assessment of what you currently support in your IT estate and surveying business teams to understand what you’ll need in the future. Manual approaches to collecting this information are labor intensive often fail to get the required information in a timely fashion.

By leveraging a digital platform conductor (DPC), however, you can cut the manual tasks, increase the accuracy of assessing your future data center needs and improve transparency into migration goals and status. A DPC allows you to:

• Connect to all your IT management tools, systems of record, and data stores outside of IT and automates the data chase to slash the time of achieving a holistic view of your current IT estate.
• Automate surveys and communications to teams and leaders to understand future business needs and regulatory requirements and to communicate decisions on application rationalization.
• Identify underutilized assets and resources that could be consolidated.
• View your IT estate from any angle to make informed decisions on how to align your needs with service provider offerings.
• Assess project progress against your goals.

ReadyWorks is a DPC. Book a demo  to understand how ReadyWorks can help you assess your business needs to plan a successful data center migration.