Eight steps for a pain-free cloud migration: Assessment, migration and support

Cloud adoption by UK companies has now neared 90%, according to Cloud Industry Forum, and it won’t be long before all organisations are benefiting to some degree from the flexibility, efficiency and cost-savings of the cloud. Moving past the first wave of adoption we’re seeing businesses ramp up the complexity of the workloads and applications that they’re migrating to the cloud. Perhaps this is the reason that 90% is also the proportion of companies that have reported difficulties with their cloud migration projects. This is frustrating for IT teams when they’re deploying cloud solutions that are supposed to be reducing their burden and making life simpler.

With over a decade of helping customers adopt cloud services, our iland deployment teams know that performing a pain-free migration to the cloud is achievable but that preparation is crucial to project success. Progressing through the following key stages offers a better chance of running a smooth migration with minimum disruption.

Set your goals at the outset

Every organisation has different priorities when it comes to the cloud, and there’s no “one cloud fits all” solution. Selecting the best options for your organisation means first understanding what you want to move, how you’ll get it to the cloud and how you’ll manage it once it’s there. You also need to identify how migrating core data systems to the cloud will impact on your security and compliance programmes. Having a clear handle on these goals at the outset will enable you to properly scope your project.

Before you begin – assess your on-premises

Preparing for cloud migration is a valuable opportunity to take stock of your on-premises data and applications and rank them in terms of business-criticality. This helps inform both the structure you’ll want in your cloud environment and also the order in which to migrate applications.

Ask the hard questions: does this application really need to move to the cloud or can it be decommissioned? In a cloud environment where you pay for the resources you use it doesn’t make economic sense to migrate legacy applications that no longer serve their purpose.   

Once you have a full inventory of your environment and its workloads, you need to flag up those specific networking requirements and physical appliances that may need special care in the cloud. This ranked inventory can then be used to calculate the required cloud resources and associated costs. Importantly, this process can also be used to classify and prioritize workloads which is invaluable in driving costs down in, for example, cloud-based disaster recovery scenarios where different workloads can be allocated different levels of protection.

Establish tech support during and post-migration

Many organisations take their first steps into the cloud when looking for disaster recovery solutions, enticed by the facility to replicate data continuously to a secondary location with virtually no downtime or lost data. This is fundamentally the same as a cloud migration, except that it is planned at a convenient time, rather than prompted by an extreme event. This means that once the switch is flipped, the migration should be as smooth as a DR event. However, most organisations will want to know that there is an expert on hand should anything go wrong, so 24/7 support should be factored into the equation.

Boost what you already have

Look at your on-premises environment and work out how to create synergies with the cloud. For example, VMware-users will find there’s much to be said for choosing a VMware-based cloud environment which is equipped with tools and templates specifically designed for smoothly transitioning initial workloads and templates. It’s an opportunity to refresh the VM environment and build out a new, clean system in the cloud. This doesn’t mean you can’t transition to a cloud that differs from your on-premises environment, but it’s a factor worth taking into consideration.

Migration of physical workloads

Of the 90% of businesses that reported difficulty migrating to the cloud, complexity was the most commonly cited issue, and you can bet that shifting physical systems is at the root of much of that. They are often the last vestiges of legacy IT strategies and remain because they underpin business operations. You need to determine if there is a benefit to moving them to the cloud and if so take up one of two options: virtualise the ones that can be virtualised – possibly using software options – or find a cloud provider that can support physical systems within the cloud, either on standard servers or co-located custom systems.

Determine the information transfer approach

The approach to transferring information to the cloud will depend on the size of the dataset. In the age of virtualisation and of relatively large network pipes, seeding can often be viewed as a costly, inefficient and error prone process. However, if datasets are sufficiently large, seeding may be the best option, with your service provider providing encrypted drives from which they’ll help you manually import data into the cloud. A more innovative approach sees seeding used to jumpstart the migration process. By seeding the cloud data centre with a point in time of your environment, you then use your standard network connection with the cloud to sync any changes before cut-over. This minimises downtime and represents the best of both worlds.

Check network connectivity

Your network pipe will be seeing a lot more traffic and while most organisations will find they have adequate bandwidth, it’s best to check ahead that your bandwidth will be sufficient. If your mission-critical applications demand live-streaming with zero latency you may wish to investigate direct connectivity to the cloud via VPN.

Consider post-migration management and support as part of the buying decision

Your migration project is complete, now you have to manage your cloud environment and get accustomed to the variation from managing on-premises applications. The power and usability of management tools should be part of the selection criteria so that you are confident you will have ongoing visibility and the facility to monitor security, costs and performance. Furthermore, support is a crucial part of your ongoing relationship with your cloud service provider and you need to select an option that gives you the support you need, when you need it, at the right price.

As more and more businesses take the plunge and move mission-critical systems to the cloud, we’ll see the skills and experience of in-house teams increase and the ability to handle complex migrations will rise in tandem. Until then, IT teams charged with migration projects shouldn’t be afraid to wring as much support and advice out of cloud service providers as possible so that they can achieve a pain-free migration and start reaping the benefits of the cloud.

Oracle automates the cloud data warehouse with AWS in its sights


Clare Hopping

29 Mar, 2018

Oracle is taking AWS head-on, with its newly launched Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud, which uses machine learning to provide self-managed security for the cloud.

The smart service can secure itself against threats and implement patches autonomously to ensure data stays as secure as it possibly can be.

Not only does the technology mean databases can be ultra-secure, but it also significantly cuts down the time it takes to set up the data warehouse. Admins don’t have to manually manage workloads, even when they change, nor do they need to lift a finger when storage volumes are adjusted.

Migration to the cloud is made simple too, with full compatibility between on-premise and cloud databases.

“This technology changes everything,” said Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder. “The Oracle Autonomous Database is based on technology as revolutionary as the Internet. It patches, tunes, and updates itself. Amazon’s databases cost more and do less.”

Oracle’s Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud spins up a secure data warehouse in seconds, automatically setting up backup, encryption and high availability without humans intervening.

The tech is built upon Oracle Database 18c, the company’s latest database infrastructure it introduced back in October, alongside its automated cybersecurity platform.

The company said in the announcement that it’s so confident in its Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud, it reckons its product offers the same workload as AWS, but at half the cost – a bold claim indeed.

This is the first Autonomous Database Cloud service Oracle plans to launch in its series. Coming up in the next few months will be Autonomous Database for Transaction Processing, Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database and Autonomous Graph Database for analysing network traffic.

Last year, just after Oracle first announced it was working on self-healing databases, Ellison said if Equifax had been using his company’s self-patching database, it would not have been hacked. 143 million customer details were exposed when hackers broke into the credit firm’s database, because the company hadn’t rolled out a patch issued by the Apache Foundation.

Salesforce harnesses Mulesoft to connect data silos


Clare Hopping

29 Mar, 2018

Salesforce has announced Salesforce Integration Cloud, taking advantage of its recent acquisition of MuleSoft to surface relevant customer data and turn it into valuable insights to better target them through relevant content.

The company explained it would use MuleSoft’s technology to power its integration cloud, although Salesforce made it clear Mulesoft’s standalone Anypoint Platform would continue to develop in its own right.

Salesforce’s Integration Cloud allows marketers to build a comprehensive profile of the customer from all sources of data, all accessible from one place, making it much easier to manage interactions and touchpoints without having to bounce from app to app, platform to platform.

This means administrators can find the best ways to target customers with relevant information across sales, service, marketing and commerce. 

An integral part of Salesforce Integration Cloud is Lightning Flow, which allows developers other parts of the business to build workflows based around customer data. It’s a visual way of building processes, which makes it easier for everyone in the organisation to understand, resulting in increased productivity and less waiting time for customers.

The company will also give developers the chance to integrate Einstein into their apps, embedding Einstein Analytics and live updates, alongside third-party Quip live apps.

“Companies of every size and industry need to transform how they operate in the digital era—and that transformation starts and ends with the customer,” said Bret Taylor, president and chief product officer of Salesforce said.

“The Salesforce Platform empowers our entire Trailblazer community, regardless of skill levels, to harness the latest advancements in technology and deliver the connected customer experiences that will take their companies and careers to new heights.”

DevOps Panel with @Aruna13 | @DevOpsSummit @CAinc #Agile #Serverless #CloudNative #DataCenter

As DevOps methodologies expand their reach across the enterprise, organizations face the daunting challenge of adapting related cloud strategies to ensure optimal alignment, from managing complexity to ensuring proper governance. How can culture, automation, legacy apps and even budget be reexamined to enable this ongoing shift within the modern software factory?
In her Day 2 Keynote at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Aruna Ravichandran, VP, DevOps Solutions Marketing, CA Technologies, was joined by a panel of industry experts and real-world practitioners who shared their insight into an emerging set of best practices that lie at the heart of today’s digital transformation.

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Oracle announces first autonomous database service, promises to ‘redefine cloud database’

Larry Ellison praised Amazon for ‘inventing’ the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market – but with the announcement of the first service based on Oracle’s much-touted autonomous database, the company aims to go bigger and better than the IaaS behemoth.

At an event yesterday, Ellison announced the launch of the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud. As the company put it, the new product ‘delivers all of the analytical capabilities, security features, and high availability of the Oracle Database without any of the complexities of configuration, tuning, and administration’.

This news had been coming. Last month saw updates to the autonomous database cloud by making all Oracle Cloud Platform services ‘self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing’, in the words of Thomas Kurian, president of product development. When Oracle reported its latest financials earlier this month, Ellison promised more of the same, expecting to deliver autonomous analytics, mobility, application development and integration services over the coming months. Attendees yesterday were told this was the ‘first of several’ autonomous PaaS services Oracle will deliver this year.

Ellison espoused his views on AWS during an impromptu break to fix slides at the beginning of his presentation. “Everyone knows, and everyone gives rightful credit to Amazon for kind of inventing the market for infrastructure as a service. They noticed that in a lot of ways it’s more efficient to rent computers than buy computers.

“Amazon pioneered the notion… but the way Oracle plans on – and is in the process of – differentiating itself from Amazon is to offer a complete suite of platform services that are at a higher level than low level infrastructure stuff,” added Ellison. “Rather than developing database applications like you used to develop, you’ll use these new PaaS services.”

Back in October, Ellison ran a series of benchmark demonstrations around running an Oracle database on an Amazon cloud, and on its own cloud, joking to the audience that he would have to skip some of the Amazon demos because they took too long to complete. The company still promises to cut Amazon bills in half running the same data on an Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud service, with the offer valid until the end of May 2019, which you can find out more about here.

Change Your Thinking About OSes

Virtual machines (VMs) have a number of features and properties that require a new way of thinking about operating systems (OSes) so that you can take full advantage of a VM. Doing a major OS update on your Mac®—or even installing a macOS® from scratch—scares many users. “What if the update fails, will my Mac […]

The post Change Your Thinking About OSes appeared first on Parallels Blog.

AWS says its entire cloud is GDPR-ready


Clare Hopping

28 Mar, 2018

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has officially announced that all of its products and services are fully GDPR-compliant, meaning any businesses looking to beef up their policies for the incoming law change are covered if they use the platform.

The company said it drafted in “security and compliance experts” to audit its inner workings as a data processor, who approved it as fully compliant. 

AWS explained the aspects that ensure it’s compliant with GDPR include the encryption of personal data, assurance that any data processed on its platform offers ongoing confidentiality, integrity, availability, and resilience and that data can be restored quickly should a physical or technical incident occur. It also said it regularly tests, assesses and evaluates its operation to ensure it complies with security.

“This announcement confirms we have completed the entirety of our GDPR service readiness audit, validating that all generally available services and features adhere to the high privacy bar and data protection standards required of data processors by the GDPR,” said VP of AWS security assurance, Chad Woolf in a blog post.

“We completed this work two months ahead of the May 25, 2018 enforcement deadline in order to give customers and APN partners an environment in which they can confidently build their own GDPR-compliant products, services, and solutions.”

Wolf said AWS is also prepped to train staff around compliance issues via a range of workshops and summits, led by its Professional Services team. The workshops are tailored to each business’s particular needs and these will be supported by presentations during the company’s European, San Francisco and Tokyo summits.

AWS will also make its compliance, data protection and security teams available to businesses via their AWS Account Manager, so if they need any further clarification AWS’s staff will be on hand to help.

Wolf also pointed to four existing services, Amazon Guard Duty, Amazon Macie, Amazon Inspector and Amazon Config Rules, that could help customers ensure their own GDPR compliance as well.

“AWS’s GDPR service readiness is only part of the story; we are continuing to work alongside our customers and the AWS Partner Network (APN) to help on their journey toward GDPR compliance,” he concluded.

Main image credit: Shutterstock

Android apps on Chromebooks: Are they any good?


PC Pro

29 Mar, 2018

Chromebook fans claim the integration of Android apps on touchscreen Chromebooks brings a new dimension – but how well do the key apps work?

Word

As you would hope and expect, the Word app is perfectly at home on a Chromebook. If you’re a OneDrive or Dropbox user, your accounts can be automatically integrated into Word, solving the problem of where to save documents — albeit restricting offline access. Unlike on the desktop, documents autosave by default, which takes a little getting used to.

The app’s mobile roots are also apparent in the behaviour of the Ribbon interface. The Ribbon is hidden by default and only revealed when you click the down arrow in the top right-hand corner. This might be a bonus for those who favour the uncluttered approach, but it’s an irritating extra click for those of us who constantly dip in and out of menus. And who do we have to bribe to get one version of Word that understands that we want to spellcheck
in UK English and not the US bastardisation?

Excel

Like Word, Excel also benefits from being able to stretch out on the larger screen of a Chromebook, but those expecting a fully-fledged desktop experience from the Android app are going to be disappointed.

On the plus side, Excel retains the content and fidelity of any workbook, but there are limitations to what you can do. Conditional formatting is displayed, for example, but you can’t apply new conditional formatting to a set of data in the Android app. Nice touches such as the live preview of charts are also absent, as is the option to create pivot tables. Naturally, you can forget about any desktop Excel plugins, too.

On the plus side, it coped fine with a password-protected worksheet, but overall it’s probably best to think of Excel for Android as more of a glorified worksheet reader than a true Excel replacement.

OneNote

Of all the main Office apps, OneNote is the one that struggles most with operating on a full-size laptop screen. It feels like a stretched mobile app, rather than the full-blown desktop app I’m used to. Maybe it’s just ingrained muscle memory, but having notebook sections running vertically down the side of the screen rather than horizontally across the top just feels awkward and wrong on a landscape screen.

That said, the app’s mobile-first design does work well in windowed mode, allowing you to pop a small OneNote window on top of, for example, the web browser and make notes while referring to the content in the background.

There’s little in the way of editing options, but arguably that’s not a major drawback for a note-taking app. If your Chromebook has stylus support, OneNote instantly kicks into Draw mode when your stylus come in contact with the screen, letting you scribble notes or draw a diagram without fuss.

Powerpoint

Whether you’re using a Chromebook to deliver a presentation or create one from scratch, there’s plenty to admire about the Android app.

It includes Presenter Mode, allowing you to preview forthcoming slides or take a look at your notes while delivering a presentation, although some of the fancier tools — such as turning your mouse into a virtual laser pointer — are missing from the app.

Creating new decks is reasonably straightforward, too. Granted, there aren’t many templates to choose from and you don’t have the option to go online and hunt for more, like you do on a PC, but there’s still enough here to knock up something that won’t show you up in the boardroom.

Moreover, Dropbox and OneDrive integration makes it easy to insert items such as photos into your slide decks. You can completely forget about video, though, whether viewing or inserting it.

Slack

Slack on a Chromebook looks much like Slack on the Windows desktop. There are a few missing functions: the ability to have side panes showing threads, documents or activity is absent, as is the option to make Slack audio/video calls to your colleagues. Curiously, these features are available in the Slack web app, which is accessible via Chrome, making you wonder why the Android app can’t catch up. Perhaps the developers have yet to see the demand for full-sized screen usage.

One other convincing reason to use Slack in the browser is the fixed font size — it’s near unreadably small on the new Pixelbook, but much kinder to the eye in the browser, where you also have the option to zoom in and out.

Outlook

I’m a big fan of the Outlook Android app on my smartphone. In many ways, I think the free Android app is better than the desktop app I’m paying £8 a month for as part of Office 365, not least in the way it separates mail wheat from chaff.

Unfortunately, it’s something of a problem child on the Chromebook. When you attempt to add an email account, the Outlook app demands that you “need to install a compatible browser”. The help files tell you to download Chrome: it’s looking for the mobile version of the browser, rather than the desktop version installed on the Chromebook. Once that was installed from the Play Store, it was all sorted, but it’s further evidence of Android apps not being quite ready for Chromebooks yet.

The other downside is the same one that afflicted the Slack app — the default font size is fixed and uncomfortably small to read for a fortysomething. Webmail is perhaps the way forward.

Chrome Remote Desktop

You might think that one way around some of the app restrictions we’ve identified would be to remote desktop into your regular PC. It’s a nice idea, but it’s flawed.

I used Chrome Remote Desktop to hook into my Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga X1, wondering whether it would let me use InDesign, Photoshop and all the other apps for which there’s no good Chromebook equivalent. Whilst making the connection wasn’t too painful, actually manipulating the desktop was.

The Lenovo’s desktop was badly shrunk within the Chromebook’s browser window, making it very difficult to read anything on the screen and impossible to hit small icons with the mouse. Any attempt to do serious work within InDesign would lead to a Chromebook being flung at the wall in a fit of rage.

Skype

Whether you’re making a business call or trying to call home from a trip abroad, Skype is an app that most people always have to hand. It works perfectly well on the Chromebook, but it’s one of those apps on which the full screen is wasted. It’s best to keep it docked in a small window for the optimum interface.

Here’s a little power tip for Office 365 subscribers — you get an hour’s free calls to local landlines as part of your subscription. Usefully, you can use these when you’re abroad to place a call to landlines in the UK, if the person or office you’re calling doesn’t have Skype.