There are many reasons why a business might consider moving some or all of its applications to public cloud platforms like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. One of the most compelling, however, is the cloud’s ability to reduce the complexity of an organisation’s IT. Removing the need for management of the physical infrastructure that applications run on can yield big benefits for simplification.

Running your applications in the cloud allows you to take advantage of a new compute economy and scale the capacity up and down as needed, as well as letting you hook into a huge range of additional tools and services. While this is well and good for building new applications, porting pre-existing legacy apps over to cloud-based services can often prove challenging.

Organisations that want to migrate pre-existing workloads to a public cloud are faced with a choice: do they re-architect their applications for cloud, or do they simply attempt to port it to their chosen platform wholesale, with no alteration? For many companies, the latter approach – known as the ‘lift-and-shift’ method – initially sounds like the more attractive option. It allows them to get into the cloud faster, with a smaller amount of work, meaning the IT team has more time to devote to other elements of the migration or to developing entirely new capabilities.

Sadly it’s not quite as simple as that. While some applications can be moved over fairly seamlessly, not all apps are suited to this method. Compatibility is the first issue that companies are liable to run into with lift-and-shift; particularly when dealing with legacy applications, there’s a good chance the original code relies on old, outdated software, or defunct libraries. This could make running that app in the cloud difficult, if not impossible, without modification. Organisations also misinterpret the business continuity options available in public cloud and sometimes assume the options are the same as the on-premises counterpart.

“In a lot of cases with server-side applications, they’re not delivered and packaged as well as workspace applications are on an end-user’s desktop,” says Lee Wynne, CDW’s Public Cloud Architecture Practice Lead, “so finding somebody who actually installed the application on the server in the first place can be difficult.”

This, Wynne points out, along with a lack of documentation and issues with upgrading the original OS that a virtual machine runs on, can prove “very costly and time consuming” when trying to port legacy applications to the cloud with an old OS. In terms of business continuity, Wynne says:

“It can take a fair amount of explaining that in the public cloud domain, the ability to move machines from host to host with zero downtime across availability zones isn’t really a thing, therefore if you are moving a critical business workload from your current data centre that is highly protected by various VMware HA features, you need to consider how that will remain online through availability zone outages. In other words, you have to architect for failure”.

Cost modelling is also a critical component, Wynne says, and organisations need to make sure that the cost modelling they’re doing is an accurate representation of what their actual usage will look like.

“The accuracy element of cost modelling is really critical when you’re assessing at scale. You’re not just assessing a couple of VMs, you’re assessing a whole data centre or a few thousand; you’ve got to be accurate with the costs, and you’ve got to be able to get the instance types that are displayed during those accurate cost assessments.

“Therefore picking the tooling and the right telemetry at the beginning, and getting those costs accurate for your business case, is probably one of the first risks that you’ll come across with a cloud migration. Otherwise, you just end up making it three times more expensive than it actually is, and therefore providing executives and decision makers with the wrong information.

“If you think way back when we went from physical servers to virtual servers, no one did an as-is migration of those physical machines – they monitored them over a two-to-three month period, and then they migrated them based on real utilisation. So they cut down memory, cut down CPU, so they could fit as much as possible on the target VMware cluster. And this is exactly the same with public cloud. That’s why you ensure that you do your cost modelling right. It needs to be lean and optimised, as you are paying by the minute or, in some cases, by the second.”

It’s important to establish how your apps interact with each other, too. Very few business applications exist in isolation, so making sure that all of the integrations and connections between software still function as required – both during and after the migration – is vital. For this reason, CDW includes a dependency mapping service as part of its Cloud Plan offering, which analyses the connections between VMs and then groups them together into functions, so that they can be migrated in smaller groups.

“That reduces risk significantly,” Wynne says. “It’s naive to think that if you’re looking to do a migration on a couple of hundred virtual machines, that you’re going to do them all in one go. It’s not the way it works, you do it batch by batch. So what you don’t want to do is introduce risk by migrating a batch of virtual machines over to public cloud and then realise afterwards that actually, these machines are going to communicate back to the source data centre on an application protocol, which is latency-sensitive – so it’ll break it, it won’t work, it’ll be too slow. So you end up having to roll back, or migrate more VMs really quickly that you didn’t plan for.”

With all this in mind, it’s absolutely key that when starting a cloud migration project, companies take the time to look at their applications realistically, identifying which of them need to be retooled before they can be moved. There may even be cases where it’s faster to rebuild an application from the ground up, rather than tweaking the existing version for a cloud deployment.

The reduction of operational complexity is a key issue for organisations of all types, and it’s one that the cloud can play a huge role in, but be warned – the process of cloud migration isn’t always a simple matter of scooping up your VMs en masse and dumping them into your chosen cloud environment. A good cloud migration involves looking long and hard at which of your applications truly belong in the cloud, and then investing time and effort in making sure that those applications are engineered to get the maximum benefit from a cloud environment.

Organisations that are looking to start this process don’t have to do it alone; CDW is a tried and tested partner, that can help guide your business to the cloud and make sure that your applications are delivering the most value with the least overhead.

Get in touch with a CDW Account Director and ask for details on. CloudCare® JumpStart and CloudCare® CloudPlan. Visit uk.cdw.com

Adopting cloud technologies is something that many organisations have struggled with, and these difficulties have been caused in no small part by large amounts of pre-existing technical debt. Legacy applications and physical infrastructure have, in many cases, become a millstone around the necks of companies who want to capitalise on the economic and transformational benefits of the cloud, leading to long migration roadmaps.

This is a challenge in and of itself, but as companies race to embrace the cloud, it’s imperative to ensure they don’t repeat the same mistakes that caused these headaches in the first place. Companies have often found themselves locked into expensive and inflexible relationships with vendors, and while this is less of an issue with the cloud than with on-premise systems, it has by no means disappeared altogether.

There are ways to mitigate the risk of cloud vendor lock-in, however, and the most important factor is proper planning. Planning is always the first phase of any cloud migration, and it’s vital to ensure that before you even open an account with a cloud provider, you’ve worked out all your application dependencies, compatibility requirements and budgets. You can then assess which cloud providers meet those needs, making it easier to identify an alternative provider to move to in the future.

Businesses should also take a long, hard look at which services they actually need to move to the cloud. Contrary to some popular wisdom, not every application and service is necessarily better off being run in the cloud. Establishing what does and doesn’t need to be migrated can save time and money later on, both in the initial migration process and potentially subsequent ones if those workloads are repatriated to on-premise systems.

Organisations should be mindful of contract lengths, too. Long lease terms on physical infrastructure are one of the biggest impediments to organisations’ cloud migrations, and although many cloud services will offer discounts on the price of longer contract lengths, this also contributes towards those same lock-in issues that you’re trying to avoid.

It’s important to remember that you can design and set up most elements of your public cloud infrastructure without spending a single penny, and you should do this as early as possible. Although public cloud providers market themselves on their ability to get up and running very quickly, mature organisations that want to undertake a comprehensive cloud deployment will quickly find that setting this up, along with all the associated account structures, security and compliance frameworks, will quickly eat up unexpectedly large amounts of time.

“None of this costs any money in terms of consumption,” says Lee Wynne, CDW’s public cloud architecture practice lead. “You can build out a well-architected multi-account AWS or Azure design, you can do all your billing strategy, and you can design and provision all your platform architecture and it costs you no money. There are no cloud consumption costs at all to do that; you have to know what you are doing but it won’t cost you a penny. So when you’re ready, when that urgent project comes along, and they go ‘yeah, we need to spin this up in Azure or AWS, or GCP ASAP’, then you’re ready to go. Nobody’s waiting for anything, it’s just done and dusted, a big tick in the box for your IT services. There’s nothing dependent on this from a project perspective, no cost assessments, no buzzwords about machine learning and AI strategies, no politics.

“Now, when it comes to thinking about vendor lock-in you start thinking ‘well, should I just be doing this for one platform? Or should I do it for all of them?’, because it’s the same. That strategy is the same across AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. They all have the same thing: a multi-account structure and a platform architecture, all can be designed and configured with no consumption so it’s not too difficult to do that for all of them. And then all of a sudden, you’ve got a little bit more choice and bit more flexibility about where you choose to deploy certain elements. The only complexity is how you set up network comms between them, if that even needs to happen.”

Designing your workloads and applications in such a way that they can be deployed across multiple clouds from the outset makes jumping ship to a new provider much easier, and it also has the added bonus of making them much leaner and more portable in general.

Vendors themselves have even started warming to the idea of customers deploying across multiple providers, and multi-cloud tools and functionalities are becoming increasingly common. VMware, for example, has been rapidly expanding its portfolio of multi-cloud management tools and has recently announced its plans to incorporate Kubernetes management tools into vSphere, making multi-cloud workload management even simpler. Microsoft has also got in on the trend, announcing earlier this year that Azure Cost Management will also help customers manage their AWS spending.

Another important consideration is the tools that you use to build and run your apps. Most organisations will likely construct their apps using open source (or at the very least widely supported) programming languages, but once those applications are in the cloud, it’s very easy to end up accidentally bolting additional compatibility requirements onto them.

“For example, AWS has CodeStar and Azure has Azure DevOps, and they have a lot of native tools in their ecosystem that you can use to wrap around your source code, test and deployment pipelines,” Wynne points out. “Then you become reliant on it; it becomes part of your DevOps process, and then it becomes part of your culture, and it becomes part of your team. So over time, you can easily end up locked into one of those cloud platforms, if you consume a lot of their native services around your source code, and you begin to extend it further into proprietary database services such as Google Firebase, Azure Cosmos and AWS Aurora and serverless monitoring and debugging tools.”

Vendor lock-in remains a major problem for many IT departments, and it can be just as much of a risk when it comes to the cloud. With thorough planning, good design and careful monitoring, however, it is possible to architect your cloud estate in a way that minimises the chance of your organisation repeating the same woes of time gone by. For businesses that want to ensure they’re implementing the right cloud strategies and designing their platforms in the most flexible way possible, CDW is an ideal partner for planning and orchestrating your cloud migration, bringing years of experience and unparalleled cloud expertise to bear on your business challenges.

Get in touch with a CDW Account Director and ask for details on CloudCare® JumpStart or CloudPlan. Visit uk.cdw.com

Microsoft has outlined a set of ambitious plans to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits by the end of the decade.

By 2030, Microsoft is aiming to be ‘carbon negative’, in that the carbon it removes from the atmosphere outweighs the carbon emitted, including the activity of its wider supply chain.

This is in addition to a $1 billion climate fund to accelerate research and development into carbon reduction, capture and removal technology that doesn’t already exist today.

Moreover, Microsoft wants to continue the trend of lowering emissions while increasing carbon removal so that by 2050 it will, on paper, have removed all the carbon it has emitted since its foundation in 1975.

«While the world will need to reach net-zero, those of us who can afford to move faster and go further should do so,» said Microsoft president Brad Smith.

«We recognize that progress requires not just a bold goal but a detailed plan. As described below, we are launching today an aggressive program to cut our carbon emissions by more than half by 2030, both for our direct emissions and for our entire supply and value chain.

«While we at Microsoft have worked hard to be «carbon neutral» since 2012, our recent work has led us to conclude that this is an area where we’re far better served by humility than pride. And we believe this is true not only for ourselves, but for every business and organization on the planet.»

The industry stalwart is the latest in a string of companies, including Amazon and HP, to enter an arms race geared on reducing carbon footprints and embracing cleaner and greener technologies.

Amazon, for example, has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2040, while Google Cloud hit its 100% renewable energy goal in April 2018, powering its data centres and offices from renewable sources, including solar and wind. Salesforce, similarly, achieved net-zero greenhouse gas emissions the previous year.

HP, on the other hand, has committed to releasing routine sustainability reports that track its progress in its aims to reduce its carbon footprint. It has started to build many of its products with sustainability in mind, including the forthcoming HP Elite Dragonfly business 2-in-1.

Microsoft says it can achieve its own «aggressive» set of targets by first investing in nature-based initiatives, such as planting trees, with the goal of shifting to technology-based programmes when they become more viable.

The wider strategy, however, encompasses a set of smaller goals that Microsoft hopes to hit along the way to achieving its major targets for 2030 and 2050.

By 2025, for instance, Microsoft is hoping to shift to a 100% supply of renewable energy, while aiming to fully electrify its global campus operations vehicle fleet by 2030.

The firm is hoping to implement new procurement processes and tools to incentivise its suppliers to reduce their carbon emissions too, with these pencilled in for July 2021. For customers, meanwhile, Microsoft will roll out a sustainability calculator and dashboard that estimates emissions from Azure services.

Google’s parent company Alphabet has become the fourth US tech company to reach a market value of $1 trillion (£765 billion), ending trading at $1,451.70 per share on Thursday.

It will hold a quarterly conference to discuss Q4 and 2019 financial results on 3 February but Wall Street Analysts are expecting it to report revenue of $46.9 billion – up 20% year-on-year.

Alphabet is now part of a US tech elite with Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all having reached the $1 trillion market cap over the past two years. The iPhone maker was the first to surpass the mark in August 2018 with Amazon hitting it a month later. Microsoft was the third company, doing so in April 2019.

Like Amazon and Microsoft, revenues from its cloud ventures are believed to have heavily contributed to Alphabet’s overall growth, with the Google Cloud Platform doubling it’s revenue run rate to £2 billion per quarter between February 2018 and July 2019, according to CNBC.

Cloud, Google’s Play app store and Google’s hardware division have all been key drivers for the company, according to its earnings report. In Q3 of 2019, revenue from these segments of the business increase 39% year-on-year.

Sundar Pichai’s recent promotion to CEO of Alphabet has also helped to increase optimism among stockholders, according to Pivotal Research Group analyst Michael Levine.

«We are incrementally more constructive about what we perceive as multiple ways to get paid under the recently appointed Pichai regime,» Levine wrote, as reported by Markets Insider. His evaluation is reportedly based on an estimate of Alphabet’s 2021 EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization).

Pichai took over as CEO of both Alphabet and Google after co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down in December. The change of leadership offers «the most optionality for multiple expansion for the stock we have seen in years,» according to Levine, who also sighted Thomas Kurian‘s helm of Google’s cloud business as a positive sign.

Sales of hardware for cloud infrastructure slid slightly over the past year as part of overall weaker sales in IT, according to IDC, but they still exceeded spending on non-cloud infrastructure for the second time ever.

The analyst firm said cloud IT infrastructure spending declined for the second quarter in a row in the third quarter of 2019, down 1.8% from the same period last year.

While public cloud infrastructure declined 3.7% on the year, that segment is still worth $11.9 billion in quarterly sales. And while sales for public cloud dropped versus the same period last year, they were up by 24% from the quarter before.

«As the overall segment is generally trending up, it tends to be more volatile quarterly as a significant part of the public cloud IT segment is represented by a few hyperscale service providers,» IDC reported, adding that public cloud makes up most of the spending.

With such volatile quarterly figures, it’s easier to look at the market on an annual basis, and IDC noted public cloud IT infrastructure had stable growth since the analyst firm began tracking the segment. «In [the third quarter of 2019], vendor revenues from private cloud environments increased 3.2% year over year, reaching nearly $5 billion. IDC expects spending in this segment to grow 7.2% year over year in 2019 to $21.4 billion,» the company predicted.

IDC splits infrastructure into three areas: ethernet switches, compute platforms, and storage. While compute will remain the largest segment for cloud infrastructure spending, it’s expected to see growth of just 3% in 2019, while storage will be flat. The Ethernet switches segment is predicted to climb 11% on the year.

IDC said that the IT infrastructure industry was reaching the point where cloud will outstrip spending on traditional, non-cloud systems. Up until this last quarter, cloud spending topped non-cloud only once, back in the third quarter of 2018. In the last quarter, cloud hardware spending topped 53%.

«However, for the full year 2019, spending on cloud IT infrastructure is expected to stay just below the 50% mark at 49.8%,» IDC added. «This year is expected to become the tipping point with spending on cloud IT infrastructure staying in the 50+% range.»

IDC forecasts traditional infrastructure will make up 42% of sales by 2023, down from 52% in 2018. That’s in part due to spending on traditional environments declining, with IDC predicting it to fall by 5.3% over 2019.

«This share loss and the growing share of cloud environments in overall spending on IT infrastructure is common across all regions,» added IDC. «While the industry overall is moving toward greater use of cloud, there are certain types of workloads and business practices, and sometimes end user inertia, which keep demand for traditional dedicated IT infrastructure afloat.»

Spend management software provider Compleat Software has expanded its relationship with Sage, adding a new integration between iCompleat and Sage Intacct.

Designed to streamline the accounts payable process, the expanded relationship will see the firm market and sell its AI-powered iCompleat Buy to Pay service on the Sage Intacct Marketplace.

The move becomes the third integration between the two companies, following previous Sage 50 and Sage 500 additions, and forms part of Compleat’s plans to expand internationally in places such as North America and Australia.

“The simplicity, rapid deployment, increased levels of automation, and cost savings achieved when buying online makes iCompleat an asset for every business,” said Annabel Sim, VP of global sales at Compleat. “This expanded partnership will help our solution to stand out and be successfully adopted in the USA and Australia, in addition to the success achieved in the UK already.”

Initially focused on North America, Sage’s Intacct integrated services repository was recently launched in the UK and Australia and is the first and only preferred financial management service of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).

Compleat’s software is the first accounts payable automation add-on with a built-in online buying service available on the platform. Its latest product allows users to make Amazon Business purchases from iCompleat, enabling automated invoice matching with simple product ordering tasks.

Through AI and machine learning, the software automates the cycle of buying, invoice capture and approval processes. This increases accounts payable efficiency, the firm said, and eliminates the risk of fraud by providing full visibility and control of company spend.

“We continue to add powerful solutions to the Sage Intacct Marketplace,” commented Eileen Wiens, VP of business development for Sage Intacct. “Sage Intacct customers can now benefit from the built-in online buying functionality and Compleat’s partnership with Amazon Business which takes the Buy to Pay software functionality to a whole new level of automation and end convenience.”