it project: migration to cloud -...

IT Project: Migration to Cloud

The cloud migration checklist: What to consider

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In this e-guide

Brexit: Cloud community

mulls over implications for

data protection regulation

reform

The cloud migration

checklist: What to consider

Why the public cloud will

revolutionise government IT

Case study: Odeon goes to

hybrid cloud for digital

transformation

Case study: Save the

Children swaps on-premise

migration plan for public

cloud

Case study: Netflix is now

100% all-in on the AWS

cloud


In this e-guide:

The benefits of using cloud are well-known, but the challenges and

barriers enterprises come up against during their move off-premise

can be wide, varied and unexpected. Knowing how best to

negotiate these issues can help speed up the process of shifting

workloads and applications to the cloud immeasurably. It may also

prove beneficial to leave certain ones where they are, depending on

the wider needs of the business. In some cases, the organisation

may lack the skills in-house to make these decisions, and it might

make sense to enlist the help of a managed services company, hit

the recruitment trail or retrain their existing staff. All these

decisions (and more) are ones enterprise IT leaders will come up

against time and again during their move to the cloud. The aim of

this guide is to shine a light on how others have dealt with some of

Caroline Donnelly, Datacentre Editor


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Leaving the European Union (EU)

influence how the global cloud market should be regulated, while potentially

paving the way for local legislation that is more sympathetic to the plight of

local providers.

Speaking at The Policy-

in London, Sue Daley, head of cloud, big data and mobile at TechUK, said

Brexit will make it harder for the IT industry to have its say on what must be

done to support the future growth of the cloud industry.

that will affect the cloud computing

Europe on the importance of cloud and driving the market forward, and now


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Th

on how to regulate the cloud market in way that will support and encourage

its growth, rather than stifle it, she said.

he foundation, the

infrastructure and the capability [we will use] to power our smart cities, and

ensure we can make the most of the big data analytics revolution

will continue to be vital, and maybe not having a voice will diminish

Polling providers

Nicky Stewart, commercial director of public sector-focused cloud provider

Skyscape Cloud Services, used her speaking slot to outline why regulators

must ensure the needs of a wide range of providers and users are catered

for when drawing up their guidance.

time. Five years ago, we were talking about IaaS, SaaS and PaaS, and now

datacentres under the sea


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She then went on to share examples of how unexpected regulatory changes

replace the Impact-Level-based (IL)

data classification system can have costly repercussions for small to

medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

IL-3 accreditation for our services to show our services were capable of

standards and accreditations, and that cost us millions to achieve that

While it may be easier for larger providers to accommodate such changes

from a cost perspective, the time, money and effort involved for smaller

providers could have a negative impact on their ability to grow and innovate.

SME cloud providers all over Britain and Europe that are

said Stewart.

have the unintended consequence of stifling all the SMEs and clearing a


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Along these lines, she also cautioned cloud providers against thinking that

Brexit will mean they can choose to ignore what the EU has to say about

how the market should be regulated.

s, it is still going to be

important for any cloud provider. We cannot afford to turn our backs on it or

Brexit and GDPR

The prospect of Brexit has sparked a lot of debate about what bearing if

any General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) will

have on the way UK cloud providers operate.

The overall aim of the GDPR which is set for introduction in May 2018 is

to provide a single set of data protection rules for all 28 EU member states

While the cloud community has been broadly supportive of its intentions,

some parts of the proposed legislation have not proved so popular.

For instance, the GDPR will put providers on an equal footing with data

controllers when it comes to assuming liability for data breaches and rule

violations. It will also require cloud firms to rewrite their contracts to cater

for the changes it will bring.


http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450299169/Post-Brexit-price-hikes-hit-cloud-and-datacentre-community-as-currency-fluctuations-bite

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hire [data protection experts], and these are not going to be admin people

able to dust off some model clauses and drop them in, as there will need to

Opportunity for more sympathetic data legislation

The (ICO) has already moved to confirm

that any company cloud or otherwise that wishes to do business in the

EU will need to have an equivalent piece of legislation in place, post-Brexit,

to cover themselves.

This point was picked up on at the event by Sam De Silva, a partner at law

firm Nabarro, who said this could present the UK with an opportunity to

create a more sympathetic piece of data protection legislation that meets

the UK to get data protection legislation that is practical, commercial and


http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450283253/GDPR-will-require-28000-DPOs-in-Europe-study-shows

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implement in practice, but we could revisit those to make them a bit more

practical and commercial.

it all falls

Speaking to Computer Weekly, Andy Lawrence, vice-president of

datacentre technologies and eco-efficient IT at market watcher 451

Research, said once the UK gets the process of extricating itself from the

EU underway there may be an influx of legal experts on hand who can help

with this.

ear the UK will take a position either identical to the EU on data

protection or one that is slightly more business-

said.

lot of EU officials working in Brussels who will be repatriated to the UK who

will perform a similar function, and the likelihood is they will replicate what

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Sarvesh Goel, Guest Contributor

There are many factors that influence the cloud migration journey for any

enterprise. Some of them may trigger change in the way software

development is approached, or even internal service level agreements, and

information security standards.

The risk of downtime, and the knock-on effect this could have on the

-

premise to cloud not go to plan, is often a top concern for some.

Below, we run through some of the other issues that can dictate how an

enterprise proceeds with their cloud migration, and how their IT team should

set about tackling them.

Application architecture

If there are multiple applications that talk to each other often, and require

high speed connections, it is best to migrate them together to avoid any

unforeseen timeout or performance issues.


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The dependency of applications should be carefully determined before

moving them to the cloud. Standalone apps are usually easier to move, but

applications that simply

Network architecture

There could be a few applications that require fast access to internal

infrastructure, telephone systems, a partner network or even a large user

base located on-premise. These can rely on a complex network environment

and present challenges that will need to be addressed before moving to

cloud.

Alternatively, if there are applications that are being served to global users

and require faster download of static content, cloud can still be the top

choice to provide customers with access to local or closer locations for

content. Such examples include the media, gaming and content delivery

industries.

Business continuity plan

Business continuity and internal/external SLA with customers often drive

the application migration journey to cloud for disaster recovery purposes.


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Cloud is an ideal target for hosting content for disaster recovery. It provides

businesses with access to certified datacentres, hybrid offerings, bandwidth,

storage and all at a lower cost.

The applications can be easily tested for failover and customisations can be

made to hardware sizing of applications if and when disasters occur.

Compliance requirements

There could be legal reasons why personal or sensitive information needs to

-premise datacentres.

Such requirements should be carefully analysed before making any decision

on moving applications to cloud, even when they are technically ready.

IT support staff training

Undertaking a migration requires having people on hand who understand the

cloud fundamentals and can support the move.

Such fundamentals include knowledge of storage, backup, building fault

tolerant infrastructures, networking, security, recovery, access control and,

most importantly, keeping a lid on costs.

Disaster recovery


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For businesses around the world, including Europe, building a disaster

recovery solution can be expensive, difficult, and requires regular testing.

Many European cloud vendors offer services on a pay as you use basis, with

built-in disaster recovery, application or datacentre failure recovery, and

continuous replication of content.

Using cloud for disaster recovery could provide a significant cost reduction

in terms of infrastructure hardware procurement and the maintenance of the

datacentre footprint.

Organisations could also choose disaster recovery locations in the same

region as the business or several thousand miles away.

To conclude, once the applications are tested on cloud, and the

legal/compliance concerns are addressed, organisations can opt for rapid

cloud transformation.

This allows the development team to adopt the cloud fundamentals and use

the relevant tool sets for rapid scaling of applications and create a more

robust application experience, embracing all the power that cloud provides

not to mention the fallback option that gradual cloud migration provides to

enterprises.

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Cliff Saran, Managing Editor

In June

The council won the AWS Global Public Sector Smart City Award and

$25,000 worth of credits on the public cloud service.

When Computer Weekly visited Peterborough last year, Richard Godfrey,

assistant director for digital at the council, explained that the council had

moved its IT infrastructure to the AWS cloud as part of a long-term vision to

make greater use of sofware as a service (SaaS).

said.

A number of local authorities are modernising their IT around off-the-shelf

cloud applications modified to support council services more efficiently and

at lower cost.


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In the Shifting sands: New structures and delivery models report from

Socitm Insight published in January, Stuart Mitchenall, head of business

services at Tanbridge council, discussed how the council was using

Salesforce as its case management system.

The development environment within Salesforce Force.com supports

agile development using sprints and storyboards, for a per user per month

cost with no long-term commitment. Mitchenall explained that third parties

such as Arcus and Methods, which provide consulting services to Tandridge,

can offer applications within this environment. These applications can

subsequently be linked together to provide common functions.

More government services are set to migrate to the public cloud as large

providers go live with UK datacentres.

AWS UK region

The AWS UK region is set to go live within six months. During a presentation

at the AWS summit in London in July

national technology adviser, discussed the importance of the AWS cloud in

the UK.

of any digital country is to have an Amazon region. AWS is a central feature


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Maxwell said the UK region wi

region in the UK at the end of this year is going to bring a massive change to

-demand

public cloud services because they feel they want to have data resident in

Maxwell estimated that using a UK public cloud could save the goverment in

the order of £100m over five years.

Migrating public services to the cloud

Max Peterson, head of public sector EMEA, said that moving IT

infrastructure into

complicated infrastructure. They see cloud as more cost-effective and more

According to Peterson, tens of thousands of software companies are

building applications on top of AWS.

plication migration aspect of

the project.


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Replicating existing application in the public cloud is one of the first steps

that public sector organisations can take to become more cloud-

lot of customers will also take the opportunity to improve fu

Peterson added.

But some users, like Peterborough, will want to take this further, by running

off-the-shelf SaaS applications, rather than migrating bespoke systems into

the cloud.

Infrastructure issues

Peterson said that in the public sector many IT departments spend 70-80%

of their time worrying about the current infrastructure, which means they

spend only a quarter of their time thinking about how to get out of this

situation. According to Peterson, this is a perfect opportunity to start looking

at the cloud.

Recently, Salesforce announced it was moving more of its software onto the

AWS platform to focus on SaaS. Given that councils such as Peterborough

and Tanbridge, among others, are looking for SaaS rather than just

infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Peterson believes more software

companies will develop SaaS apps for the public sector built on top of AWS.

He said


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Public sector IT chiefs will buy capabilities rather than just cloud

infrastructure. As an example, Peterson said scientific researchers can now

go onto the AWS marketplace, search for a product that matches their high-

performance computing requirements and launch it in a matter of minutes.

The big benefits

He added that people often start with trying to lower costs by using the

cloud to replace physical server and storage infrastructure in their own

datacentres, running IaaS. But the real benefit of the cloud is that it gives

organisations speed and agility, he said.

Among the benefits of the cloud in the public sector is the ability to share

data.

The authors of the Socitm Insight Shifting Sands report suggest that

by relaxing working practices which restrict access to working data and

information, and making it machine-readable, accessible and reusable by

third parties, local and central government have the opportunity to enable

the data they hold to be reused in ways that were not originally considered.

This could lead them to redesign public services.

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The competitive threats to companies in the cinema sector are wide, varied

and often difficult to predict.

Not only is there competition between the established cinema chains to get

people through their doors, but the sector is also coming under attack from

newer market entrants, such as on-demand streaming services from Netflix

and Amazon Prime.

particularly in the summertime, while the broadcasting and celebration of

major sporting events can reduce footfall.

Then there are delays to the release date of highly anticipated films, which

can have a knock-on effect. That is precisely what happened to Odeon and

UCI Cinemas Group in 2014. Several, potentially high-earning films had their

release dates pushed back in the summer of that year so as not to clash

with the Fifa World Cup in Brazil, leading to downbeat attendance figures.


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exceptionally light film slate due to the Fifa World Cup, lack of family

according to al report.

Digital push

That same year saw some big organisation changes undertaken at the

cinema group, including the appointment of a senior management team who

drive up profits.

digital push has largely centred on finding ways to improve the customer

experience.

get more information about them so we can serve them more efficiently,

target them with campaigns more effectively and deliver a better overall

has to be on customer experience [as a differentiator] from their first

interaction with us on the web or on the app, right until they walk into the

cinema.


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because offering a first-class cinema experience is what will keep people

Cloud clears way for digital transformation

The digital push is one of the major reasons why Odeon has made a

concerted effort in recent years to embrace the use of private and public

cloud services, Miskell adds.

een moving away from a more traditional retail model of selling

tickets in cinemas and what have you, and building our online and app-based

presence and pusignh more trade through those channels.

of our

platforms, but we also have a large IT heritage and legacy we still need to

manage and maintain. There are elements of things we develop [in the

cloud] we may want to keep on-

On-site element

There are some workloads that need to remain on-premise for latency

purposes, for instance, prompting the cinema chain to favour a hybrid cloud

approach to IT delivery.


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lm booking systems are on-premise, and we have

split test and development across both environments. What we tend to use

A lot of the back-end processing work for the Odeon gift cards the company

sells in supermarkets, for example, is carried out in the Amazon Web

Services (AWS) public cloud.

Private cloud deployment

The company has recently taken steps to reinforce its commitment to the

hybrid cloud approach by enlisting the help of Manchester-based IT services

provider ANS Group to deploy a managed private cloud platform within its

own co-location facility.

The setup replaces an existing virtualised infrastructure that had served its

purposes and was approaching capacity, according to Miskell,. It also allows

the company to take advantage of infrastructure as a service (IaaS)-type

capabilities in a private cloud setting.

It also comes equipped with disaster recovery and business continuity

functionality, while ANS takes care of its maintenance and support on a 24/7

basis.


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The Rapid cloud platform is designed to help organisations get up and

running in the cloud quickly, with ANS quoting a deployment window of 28

days for the setup.

To achieve this, the platform is delivered to the customer site with all

preliminary integration and test working already carried out.

Responsiveness

The ability to get up and running quickly was a critical consideration for

Odeon and its digitisation agenda, which is focused on ensuring the

company is positioned to respond to changes in consumer demand as fast

and efficiently as possible.

management platform on top of that either from VMware, Microsoft or

OpenStack that gives you the automation, the cost tracking of the VMs

-intensive and, in my experience of working with other

organisations that have gone down that route, you typically need to take out

a big professional services engagement with an IT partner after putting the

infrastructure on site.


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professional services, five days a week over 50 weeks, and it can take a long

With the Rapid private cloud systems now in place, Miskell says the

organisation hopes to have completed the process of moving its existing,

legacy systems to the new setup by September 2016.

-type experience with

DevOps tools

The successful execution of a hybrid cloud setup is often gauged by how

little the user experience differs between environments.

Odeon, Miskell says, has achieved consistency here through the use of

DevOps-type automation, and provisioning tools from the likes of Puppet

and Jenkins to generate new virtual machine instances in either

environment.


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e can log into a portal, spin up new virtual machines, and we use Jenkins

and Puppet to provision and configure environments in AWS and in the

that can be consumed using DevOps tooling like Jenkins and Puppet to

Becoming agile

While the company is making use of the tools of DevOps, Miskell says the

company is a little way off fully subscribing to more agile ways of managing

software development and deployment.

culturally things are changing as well. We have a traditional waterfall

nowledgement that this is the way the

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-


Save the Children International has shifted most of its back-office systems

to the CenturyLink public cloud, as part of the not-for profit organisation's

push to serve 15,000 users worldwide.

The organisation focuses on helping children whose lives are disrupted by

natural disasters, armed conflict or disease outbreaks, by providing them

with medical attention, emotional support and shelter.

Save the Children International has a global staff of 15,000 running

humanitarian operations across 55 countries. Workers need consistent

access to core IT systems from wherever they are in the world.

This requirement -ending push to

conserve costs largely dictates its IT strategy, Graham Kent, Save the

ice delivery, tells Computer Weekly.

-office systems like

anyone else. We have a HR platform, a collaboration platform, we have a


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https://www.savethechildren.net/

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working in a warzone in South Sudan, for example, or a very low low-

bandwidth area in West Africa somewhere with a fraction of the budget a

traditional enterprise might have.

with humanitarian programming, because we want to spend our money on

Counting costs

Since joining the charity in the summer 2014, Kent has reduced the size of

the not-for- -premise IT estate by expanding its use of cloud

e business productivity suite, Office

365.

we had some accounts with an element of cloud-hosting with Savvis, which

has now rolled into CenturyLink Cloud, and we had some of our own server

The cloud-hosting deal was in the throes of being wound down when Kent

in the wake

of its acquisition by CenturyLink in 2011.


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of migrating services within Savvis, and they were bringing them back to go

in-house to host them on-premise again, because they were under pressure

to save money, and they deemed they could lose this operational

After spending some time settling into the job, and getting a feel for the

a dot.com we ran our own stuff on-premise because we had a team of 50

great people doing loads of DevOps and it worked out much better value for

the business, and I started to look at this project and the migration was not

doing well; the guys were trying to achieve a $50,000 a year saving, but I

started to worry this move would put us in a terrible position long-

Arrested development

Three months after joining, Kent called a halt to the initiative to carry out a

thorough total cost of ownership and performance analysis. Kent wanted to


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see what the long-term benefits would be for Save the Children

International.

We came out with a model that I did not want to bring that big back in-house

it was going to cost us more, and would require more staff, and I was

After completing this fact-finding mission, Kent concluded the move would

save the charity $50,000 in the short-term, but as the demands placed on

this hardware grew over time another costly migration was likely to be

needed within 18 months or so.

Kent shared his misgivings about the long-term implications of this move

senior management team, and put forward an alternative

business plan that would eventually pave the way for nearly all of its major IT

systems to run out of the CenturyLink public cloud.

in IT

and we want to use IT-enabled change within the organisation over the next

Sifting public cloud suppliers

which was

difficult, because the budget was already locked in for 2015, and it is very


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hard for a non-governmental organisation (NGO) to change that kind of

The business case suggested abandoning the on-premise migration, and

customer relationship management (CRM), donor management and staff

intranet to the public cloud.

Before opting for the CenturyLink Cloud, a number of other public cloud

providers were considered and discounted from the running over a four-

week period because they could

requirements, said Kent.

for an organisation like ours is the human-side of the account management

that comes with some of their services, because

address at the end of a support line, which you are with AWS unless you pay

have big


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Joining the dots

The CenturtyLink contract was signed at the end of 2014, and the phased

February 2015.

is still physically

located in the same server room that this was all originally going back into.

political decision across the

entire association about whether or not we should all merge all the

Moving the bulk of its back-office systems to the public cloud has benefited

Save the Children International in a number of ways, and freed the

-

consuming infrastructure maintenance and support work.

man

at lots of the legacy infrastructure we have in field offices and country

at stuff, which is much more strategic to our organisation.


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popular with

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-


Video-streaming service Netflix has completed its seven-year push to

reduce its reliance on private datacentres so it can run all its operations in

the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Yury Izrailevsky, vice-president of cloud and platform engineering at Netflix,

confirmed in a blog post that the company had completed its wholesale

migration into the AWS cloud in January 2016.

A report in the Wall Street Journal revealed in August 2015 how close Netflix

was to going all-in on the AWS cloud, with the article suggesting the move

would be completed by the end of the summer.

In the blog post, Izrailevsky said the cloud move took as long as it did

be -premise took a lot of hard work

The firm had to completely rewrite a lot of its processes and applications so

they would run natively in the cloud. It also had to change the way its teams


https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-netflix-cloud-migration

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500251818/Netflix-shuts-down-final-datacentre-to-go-all-in-on-public-cloud

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operate, so they could adopt a continuous delivery strategy for new

software code.

time and effort to transform Netflix into a cloud-native company, but it put us

in a much better position to continue to grow and become a global TV

While this has been going on behind the scenes, Netflix has signed up 75

million subscribers and rolled out its services to 130 countries, with the help

.

our own datacentres; we simply could not have racked the servers fast

He went on to describe the service availability benefits Netflix has received

since starting the process of downsizing its datacentre footprint in August

2008.

Outages were a common occurrence when operating its own datacentres,

and do still occur in the cloud, he admitted, but the move off-premise has

resulted in greater reliability overall.


http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500270156/AWS-expands-datacentre-footprint-in-APAC

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500270156/AWS-expands-datacentre-footprint-in-APAC

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-scale distributed system, including a

cloud-

reliable services out of fundamentally unreliable but redundant components.

our architecture, and being disciplined about regular production drills

using Simian Army, it is possible to survive failures in the cloud infrastructure

The move to cloud has also enabled the company to cut costs, said

Izrailevsky, which he described as more of a side benefit to the move.

continuously optimise instance type mix and to grow and shrink our footprint

near-

he said. enefit from the economies of scale that are only

Next article


http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-simian-army.html

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