What we see with many companies that want to move to the cloud, is that they don’t know what to start with.

Simple. But crucial.

To prioritize the candidates for your cloud transformation is crucial because it means that you can transform your business applications and servers in the right order. Which in turn means that you can benefit from your cloud journey sooner.

For cloud migration – and other digital transformations – there are a few introductory questions that come before the technical discussions.

Where is a good place to start?

Where does it hurt the most?

Where will it be most fruitful to make an effort first?

To successfully transform, it is vital to know your existing platform in detail.

How to get to that level of knowledge?

Start with a comprehensive inventory of your digital estate.

Don’t fret!

Yes, it used to be a hassle to gain an overview of your IT infrastructure (and frankly impossible to gain a complete overview).

But with the advanced algorithms, we sport today, it’s a pretty simple process.

An intelligent software will give you a complete inventory mapping of your entire digital estate.

In no time.

Automatically, of course.

If you lack insight into what systems and applications are critical and interdependent, it is difficult to make informed decisions about how to prioritize in the cloud migration process.

But if you do an automatic inventory mapping of your entire infrastructure, you get a complete overview of all servers, operating systems, and applications.

Intelligent services can automatically discover all servers, systems, and applications to provide an exhaustive inventory mapping of connections and interdependencies.

(Full disclaimer: We provide a service that does just that. A pretty good one, if I may say so.)

When you gain that overview of your digital estate and insights into the interdependencies within your IT infrastructure, then you can plan your cloud transformation with the right prioritizations.

So begin with an automatic inventory mapping.

Do you know how your business-critical applications are connected in your IT infrastructure?

Or are you fiddling with individual servers?

We worked to come up with a method that helps you go from a server view to an application view of your IT infrastructure.

To allow you to transform applications instead of individual servers.

So we have developed a service, that automatically groups business applications in the IT infrastructure.

A business application consists of one or more servers that deliver an application.

Examples of business applications are a finance system, a CRM solution, an intranet, or a sales management system.

It can also be of more technical character such as IT system management, patch management, or print servers.

Mugato does an advanced analysis of the network traffic between servers, server configuration, and the software installed.

Then, the algorithms group the servers based on this information.

This enables you to manage the servers in clusters and make decisions based on the context of application interdependencies and system functionality, instead of fiddling around with individual servers.

For planning a digital transformation process, this means that instead of looking at, let’s say, 800 servers, you are looking at 800 servers modeled into 87 business interdependencies.

So instead of juggling hundreds of servers, your task becomes finding out what business application clusters are most critical to transform.

With this method, you simplify the transformation drastically, by boiling your entire infrastructure down to the systems and applications present.

Figure out what systems you need to prioritize in your cloud transformation plan.

Go from hundreds of servers to the two applications, you should start with.

Rightsizing isn’t a cloud-specific activity, but a cloud migration lends itself very well to rightsizing.

A cloud transformation can motivate a rightsizing process.

What’s the motivation?

One.

(The obvious one.)

Because cloud is pay-as-you-go, being rightsized is key for keeping your costs clear-cut.

Two.

(The uncomfortable surprise, that you want to avoid.)

If you move your IT to the cloud with its current configurations, without giving a thought to rightsizing, your costs in the cloud will likely skyrocket.

On the other hand, if your environment is rightsized before you move it to the cloud, you will only pay for what you need. From the very beginning.

Our partners, who facilitate digital transformations in large organizations, agree that there is a shiny opportunity for rightsizing when entering into a digital transformation.

At that time, you are already doing focused work on the nitty-gritty of your infrastructure, so the option to rightsize while you’re at it might seem obvious.

For some, it’s a no-brainer to include this activity, because they already have a practice of continuous rightsizing. But to be honest, we rarely see that.

Most organizations have a (scarily) laissez-faire approach to their capacity fit. If you are in an organization like most, you are overprovisioning immensely.

That means you’ll be paying for capacity that you don’t need.

In the cloud, those unnecessary costs can be severe.

Most who choose to include rightsizing as a preliminary activity of a digital transformation, experience a visible impact on the transformation that follows and how it lands. Proper preparation is the key to a successful transformation.

If you rightsize when you enter into a cloud transformation, you can ensure your capacity fit from the very beginning.

That being said, rightsizing is not a one-hit discipline.

Staying rightsized can be a continuous activity.

You might want to keep an eye on your capacity fit.

Perhaps introduce capacity management as a continuous part of finOps.

(Cloud finOps, if you’re into the lingo.)

Worried that this will be another reoccurring resource-heavy activity on your table?

Automate the process.

Choose a service that does ongoing automatic monitoring of your IT environment.

Intelligent services can help you stay updated on your capacity and resource utilization.

Ensure your capacity fit on an ongoing basis.

Then you can sleep tight knowing that your cloud costs won’t run wild.

We provide a (pretty clever) service that supports you in all of the above.

This solution provides actionable data for your rightsizing process and helps you ensure your capacity fit in the future.

Here are two approaches to rightsizing based on functionality/features we provide with Mugato:

This is a resource utilization bubble chart.

It visualizes the servers in your IT infrastructure based on resource utilization.

What you see here, is that a few databases do use a lot of resources.

It (obviously) makes sense to allocate a lot of resources to those.

But what we also see, is that the majority are tiny machines.

That’s the multitude of little light blue bubbles on the left (in the last part of the animation, that is.)

These are probably worth consolidating.

Simple as that.

This visualization (top graph) is an overview of CPU utilization.

This data visualization shows you where there is an opportunity to cut allocated CPU on a large scale, and where you should turn the knobs on individual servers.

A way for you to see the actual utilization on your servers, and what you can rightsize without losing on performance.

If you want to be precise, consider the percentile.

What has the peak been for 95% of server lifetime?

What has the peak been for 99% of server lifetime?

For instance, the servers represented by the top spikes can be sized roughly after the 99 percentile. But on the bottom of the same line, you see quite a lot of servers, that don’t even get a spike on that graph. They simply use very little of the allocated CPU.

When you look at that bottom line, it’s pretty remarkable how much you can rightsize.

Without losing performance.

A data visualization like this can help you find a better balance between performance and utilization, so you don’t overprovision.

The decision is cemented. You’re moving to the cloud.

And although it might feel like a relief (after all, the decision process has been long, and changing your old ways to dive into new technologies seems sexy), that fluffy feeling of ease will soon be gone.

Once a cloud migration is on the drawing board, challenges appear.

By the end of this page, you’ll have an idea about the most common challenges that we hear people struggle with, in a conventional cloud migration. And approaches to solve them. So you don’t have to take a whack-a-mole approach to your cloud transformation but can tackle these challenges in advance.

Here are the two overarching challenges that we hear our customers struggle with when they dive headfirst into a cloud migration:

This is the problem in short:

Insufficient information.

That’s it.

For most organizations, that’s the overarching issue:

Insufficient information about the digital estate.

Without the right information about your current IT, you can’t make informed decisions about your future IT.

If you lack insight into what systems and applications are critical and interdependent, it is difficult to make informed decisions about how to prioritize in the cloud migration process.

So how will you plan and prioritize your cloud transformation?

Guesswork?

Freestyle?

Roll the dice?

The reason that most organizations don’t have that information?

That they don’t know what systems are critical? Which applications are interdependent?

They’ve lost the overview of their IT.

Getting that overview of your IT back is key.

And it’s a lot more simple than it sounds.

Today, a good software service can provide you with a complete inventory mapping of your entire digital estate.

In no time.

Automatically, of course.

For your cloud transformation to be successful, it is important to truly understand your existing digital estate and the interdependencies within your digital landscape.

So get that overview. Do a detailed inventory of the existing digital estate before planning the cloud migration. Gain an understanding of your business applications and their interconnections.

A few services even give you algorithmic advice with precise recommendations for planning the cloud migration. (Full disclaimer: We provide one of those. A highly effective one, even.)

When you have the right information about your digital estate.

When you’ve gained insight into the interdependencies within your IT infrastructure.

Then you can plan your cloud transformation with the right prioritizations.

Read more about the stages of a cloud migration here.

“We need an accurate calculation of cloud capacity.”

Of course, you do.

But the calculation is complex. There are many factors to consider.

Details on capacity and resource utilization in your digital estate. Unclear benefits of the options offered by cloud vendors. Pricing. Licensing.

Calculating the capacity needed in the cloud takes expertise.

It also takes insight into the precise details of capacity and resource utilization in your existing digital estate.

Companies that try to do the math themselves, often find that their cloud costs become sky-high. Much higher than driving IT on-premise.

We recommend that you use a service that can automatically calculate cloud pricing.

Not based on guesswork and moving around numbers, but based on data about the capacity and actual utilization of your current IT infrastructure.

If you calculate cloud pricing 1:1 (that is, if you plan to throw your IT in the cloud with its current configuration and do your calculations based on that), the cost will likely be so high that it won’t pay off.

Instead, calculate cloud pricing with an automatic service that bases the calculation on actual utilization.

An intelligent service will help visualize where you can tune the needs of your cloud capacity.

Most often, this will reveal an economic potential in transforming to cloud.

This is a mistake to avoid.

No, it’s not an easy fix.

It’s about taking your time to do a proper job

Many organizations underestimate the time perspective of a cloud transformation.

The desire to transform often rushes the process.

The consequence of rushing a transformation, ironically, is that the transformation is delayed. Or it breaks budgets. But usually both.

Here’s a simple Danish saying for you:

“Things take time.”

(That’s Piet Hein, for the young ones).

And of course, you are busy.

And of course, you need to fit your IT projects to the business perspectives.

And of course, you need to meet your goals.

But you should not rush this through.

Every unforeseen obstacle you meet is a cause for delay.

So the key is proper preparation.

Lucky for you, you live in a time of intelligent IT and efficient algorithms.

So make use of that!

Use an automatic solution to:

• Do an automatic inventory of your digital estate. Get the full overview.
• Get an accurate calculation of your cloud costs based on your actual utilization.

That enables you to plan your cloud transformation with the right prioritizations. And gives you a solid foundation for a successful implementation.

Proper preparation will save you time and money in the end.

It’s not an easy fix. It’s doing a proper job.

Let’s jump into some definition-gymnastics.

We often tell our customers that we don’t do cloud migration. We do cloud transformation.

The difference?

Most of our customers are smart enough to spot the benefits of one over the other.

When this migration is executed without any prior changes to the digital estate, it’s a lift-and-shift migration.

Some consider this a simple way of executing a cloud migration. In our modest opinion, it’s the opposite. It’s a certain way of complicating your IT.

And although there are several advanced services that support a well-executed and intelligent journey to the cloud (we humbly provide one of those), some organizations still choose to do this simple migration, where they move everything within their digital estate to the cloud. Without thinking twice. Sigh.

When organizations move the entire digital estate to the cloud in a headless lift-and-shift, they always bring a lot of stuff that they don’t need anymore. Shadow IT. Zombie servers.

You would be surprised how much unused IT is left lying around in the shadows of most IT infrastructures.

We find that up to 5% of servers are no longer in use and can be decommissioned. No need to move that to the cloud. And pay a good load of money to store it there. Obviously.

Moving everything without prior assessment and optimization never pays off. You’re just pushing the problems in front of you. Your future self will slap your forehead.

All we say is this.

Want to move your IT to the cloud? Go for it. Just make sure to map out what you have first.

Do an automated mapping of your IT infrastructure. Know what you have.

Now, clean it up before you move anything.

Dust off those servers. Eye out what is no longer in use. Get rid of that.

Really, what we’ve added to the conventional method of cloud migration, is the option for you to improve your IT.

Since you are transforming your IT by moving to the cloud anyway, take this opportunity to improve it.

Full disclaimer: Mugato is not a tool for executing the cloud migration itself. Our main thing is giving you the full overview of your entire digital estate, help you optimize it to make sure it reaches the cloud in its best shape, and maintain the overview of your IT afterward.

As for the migration itself, Mugato will help monitor the process and visualize the ongoing cloud migration, so you can ensure that everything is going according to plan.

Importantly, once you’ve moved to the cloud, Mugato ensures continuous monitoring. So that your IT is managed based on facts about your digital estate. An always updated view of your IT.

We call this a continuous approach to cloud transformation. You can call it whatever you want. As long as you remember both the before and after of the actual migration, instead of just throwing all of your assets in the cloud.

In Mugato, we work with these four stages of a cloud transformation process:

Discover, plan, improve, and monitor.

This is how we work in Mugato. Of course, there are other models and frameworks for the cloud migration process. No matter what you choose, we recommend that you go for a tool or service that is with you all the way. From preparation and planning to beyond the cloud migration itself.