3 Phases of Cloud Migrations: Maintaining Visibility Throughout

Maintaining visibility in the cloud continues to be a top priority for many organizations—regardless of what industry they are in. In fact, Flexera’s 2023 State of the Cloud report stated that 66 percent of respondents listed cloud migrations as one of their top nine cloud challenges. Although cloud migrations are common in the workplace today to support digital transformations, they continue to present a myriad of management challenges that impact not only IT staff but the company as a whole. Some of these cloud migration challenges may include:

• Network bandwidth issues impacting employee connectivity
• Latency or slow application performance causes quality issues and increases users’ frustration as their experience is affected
• Downtime, disruptions, and poor user experience causing a partial or even complete loss in productivity
• Limited IT resources to assist with migration challenges throughout each phase

To combat these and other challenges experienced before, during, and after complex cloud migrations, packet-level visibility is essential to ensure consistent and reliable network and application performance from anywhere at any time.

Improving Success in the 3 Phases of Application Migrations

Migrating applications to the cloud is not undertaken on a whim: The process is complicated, expensive, and usually has the oversight of senior management. Detailed planning and well-defined processes can help make execution a success, especially when the applications are so important to business operations.

The following steps—based on preplanning, evidence gathering, and informed decision-making, coupled with ongoing monitoring and management following deployment—will help to create a solid foundation for each of the 3 phases of critical migrations.

Pre-migration:

• Assess the performance of the application with a predeployment audit before migration, which provides valuable information on service dependencies, responsiveness, capacity, and user experience for concrete evidence and informed decision-making.
• Identify expected utilization metrics, capacity requirements, and service dependencies, based on the actual utilization of current applications, to include in the development plan.
• Develop the deployment plan, performance management needs, and implementation strategies specific to the application being moved.

Migration:

• Migrate the application using performance monitoring and user experience testing to ensure the quality post-migration matches expectations and that if issues emerge the metrics are available to pinpoint and rectify the problem quickly.

Post-migration:

• Monitor going forward to ensure user experience and quality performance meet goals for the application and you have the ability to share evidence of problems with vendors and of success with senior management.
• Optimize the environment for bandwidth and capacity needs as well as user experience with proactive performance monitoring and trending to ensure the best service delivery in a cost-effective way.

Migrations and ERP Applications

Many organizations, particularly those managing complex logistics between deliveries, pickups, receiving, and other services, rely on mission-critical applications to ensure that operations are smooth. Even one bump in the road can have serious downstream implications, negatively affecting employees, customers, revenue, and brand reputation. For this reason, the adoption of sophisticated enterprise resource planning (ERP) software applications has increased significantly. In fact, all 500 companies in the Fortune 500 rely on ERP software. As ERP systems become more ingrained in company processes and procedures, the impact of performance disruptions in this software becomes significantly more critical to business.

When businesses undergo a cloud migration, simultaneously migrating an ERP application swiftly through each phase of the transition is fundamental to success. ERP applications support a variety of essential business functions, including:

• Supply chain management processes
• Accounting and financial planning
• Research and development
• Manufacturing and service delivery
• Customer relationship management

To maintain business continuity and ensure uninterrupted performance in essential areas, organizations can leverage instrumentation in data centers, remote sites, colocations, cloud environments, and more. Increased visibility can help IT teams assure optimal network and application performance at any location.

Supporting Cloud Migrations with NETSCOUT Visibility

With NETSCOUT’s nGenius Enterprise Performance Management solution, organizations have pervasive, end-through-end visibility into cloud environments. NETSCOUT’s deep packet inspection at scale provides the insight needed to support all stages of cloud migrations and ensure that critical networks and applications such as ERP systems are performing seamlessly.

Today’s leading organizations continue to need agnostic, proactive, end-through-end visibility during cloud migrations. By continuously gathering Smart Data throughout the infrastructure, IT teams are able to determine the root cause of slowdowns and degradations, triage issues swiftly, and reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) before user experience, employee productivity, customer satisfaction, or business operations are negatively impacted.

Learn more about how this organization leveraged NETSCOUT solutions to assure positive user experiences, eliminate visibility gaps, and maintain business continuity and positive user experiences before, during, and after its cloud migration.

“For additional information, check out this NETSCOUT article recently published by InformationWeek: Navigating the Cloud: Ensuring Visibility Across the 3 Phases of Migration”