migrating to the cloud key insights and integration …...3 ebook migrating to the cloud: key...

Cloud migration is imperative for survival in today’s digital marketplace. In this ebook, Slalom and Dell Boomi share best practices and tips for helping organizations with their journeys to the cloud.

Migrating to the Cloud Key Insights and Integration Strategies for Success

2 eBook | Migrating to the Cloud: Key Insights and Integration Strategies for Success

3 Moving to the Cloud: What You Need to Know

4 Chapter 1: 5 Things to Do Before You Begin Any Cloud Migration Project

11 Chapter 2: Making Cloud Migration Work: 5 Tips for Adopting Agile Practices

19 Chapter 3: 5 Best Practices for Any Cloud Migration Project

26 Chapter 4: 5 Tips for Making Your AWS Migration a Success

33 Conclusion: Migrate to the Cloud, Transform Your Organization

34 About Slalom/About Dell Boomi

Table of Contents


Cloud migration is the most important technology transition businesses have faced in decades.

The on-premise applications of old simply can’t deliver the performance, agility or scalability required by today’s global, digital marketplace. To keep up — let alone excel — smart organizations must rebuild their application portfolios and infrastructure. And they must act now.

The new generation of cloud software, platforms and services is evolving so rapidly that organizations stuck with older, on-premise applications and systems will find it increasingly difficult to compete.

So businesses must migrate to the cloud soon, and that migration must be done well. No organization can afford to waste time, resources and money re-engineer its cloud infrastructure because of rushed design choices, brittle architecture or cumbersome coding.

Done poorly, cloud migration creates new complexity and drives up costs. Done right, cloud migration creates dramatic new efficiencies and establishes a flexible foundation for future innovation.

How can businesses manage this monumental transition, especially when IT organizations remain overworked and overstretched?

Dell Boomi has teamed up with leading IT consultancy Slalom to help customers with their journeys to the cloud. From our mutual work with the world’s top companies across many industries, we have developed key methodologies and best practices for ensuring successful cloud migration projects.

This ebook, “Migrating to the Cloud,” presents our insights for how organizations can best plan for and carry out their cloud migration efforts. With this knowledge in hand, you can get your cloud efforts started off on the right path to receive all the benefits you expect.

Moving to the Cloud: What You Need to Know

https://boomi.com/

https://www.slalom.com/

As with so many big undertakings, preparation is critical to success in cloud migration.

Begin by launching a discovery process to understand the scope of the challenges being addressed and to formulate a migration plan. If your organization is not already using agile practices, now is the time to adopt them.

Cloud applications evolve quickly. Agile development and release cycles are the only way to keep up.

Begin thinking in terms of people, processes and technology. Who needs to be involved? What processes should be followed? What technology is needed?

Next, you’ll want to identify the easiest tasks with the greatest benefits. Finally, you’ll want to capture your plan in writing.

Now let’s dive in. Here are five things to do before you begin buying software or writing code for any cloud migration project.

5 Things to Do Before You Begin Any Cloud Migration Project

CHAPTER 1


Begin your cloud migration project with a formal discovery process, and use that process to explore every aspect of the initiative. What needs to change? Why does it need to change? Who would be affected by the change? What would be the effects of migrating a particular application or group of applications to the cloud? What changes in staffing or workflows would be required to support the new cloud environment?

In this discovery phase, we take nothing for granted. We want to make sure the organization really understands what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and how it’s going to affect the organization overall.

It’s important to note that cloud migration almost always means more than taking a business application running in an on-premise data center and replicating it in a public or private cloud. Every organization we work with wants to take advantage of the new features, the new interfaces and open APIs available in the latest SaaS applications.

And even if enterprises didn’t know about these new features, the nature of cloud computing requires changes — often quite sweeping changes — to the status quo. Why? One reason is that cloud applications today are developed and managed using agile practices.

The application itself and any third-party services it depends on are now typically updated every two to four weeks, not every six months or longer like legacy applications.

To keep up with a fast-shifting infrastructure, the new cloud services have to be designed and implemented to move at the same pace. For many organizations, that’s a significant change.

Which leads us to our second point.

Launch a discovery process to understand problems, ideate plans and designs, and create your plan1


Since moving to the cloud is almost impossible without adopting agile processes, if the organization’s development and operations teams haven’t yet embraced the Agile methodology, they’ll end up doing so now.

The effect of agile processes isn’t limited to the development team. Developers can’t work through burn-down lists if there’s no way to deliver updates continuously to production systems. Operations needs to adopt agile processes to deliver continuous integration, keeping in sync with the development team. And business leaders need to be actively involved in prioritizing and approving features and enhancements.

These different teams work like an interlocking set of gears in a machine. Once the development gear starts turning more quickly to support agile processes, it forces all the other connecting gears to turn more quickly, too. This can be disruptive at first, but the long-term benefits can be profound.

The organization as a whole becomes more nimble, which brings essential speed to operations and workflows. The business side can respond much more quickly to market opportunities and competitive pressures. Developers can rapidly implement new features to address critical customer needs. And operations teams can continuously optimize IT investments to get the best possible performance.

Commit to Agile processes that bring together business, development and operations2


When tackling cloud migration or any other major IT project, don’t just think in terms of technology. Ask about the impact on people and processes: Which people are affected directly and which people are affected indirectly? Who needs to be hired and who might need to be reassigned or retrained? What’s the impact on processes? How should processes change? What’s the best possible outcome for making all these changes?

To successfully handle all these elements — people, processes and technology — it’s important to have a methodology. The methodology that Slalom has created is called the Product Engineering Methodology, or PEM.

Slalom uses the PEM to engage clients through the discovery process, and then take that discovery into delivery. The information gleaned allows Slalom to build out an implementation plan based on the customer’s ultimate goals.

At every stage of the four-stage process, Slalom thinks about more than just technology. IT users and business users are taken into consideration, as are processes for developers, operations teams and business users. The technology that supports and connects all these users and processes is also a factor.

That technology must be able to support agile processes, so whenever possible Slalom selects solutions like Dell Boomi’s unified integration platform, that provide low-code development, streamlining integrations and enabling business users to play a larger role in creating and managing integrations and workflows.

Think in terms of people, processes and technology3

https://www.slalom.com/insights/product-engineering-methodology

https://www.slalom.com/insights/product-engineering-methodology


When developing your migration plan, analyze tasks in terms of potential benefits and ease-of-completion. For each task, ask what benefits it could deliver and how easy it will be to complete.

Then, plot the tasks you’re considering on a quadrant with axes for high benefit/low benefit and easy-to-do/hard-to-do. When you’ve plotted these tasks, you’ll end up with your tasks sorted into four categories:

• High benefit, easy to do

• Low benefit, easy to do

• High benefit, hard to do

• Low benefit, hard to do

Start with the tasks that deliver high benefits and are easy to do. These “quick wins” will give the project some momentum and help win over any skeptics who are wondering if the cloud migration project can really succeed.

Low-benefit/hard-to-do tasks should be de-prioritized. Everything in the middle will need to be sorted against organizational needs.

Sorting tasks and identifying wins helps turn even the most daunting task lists into sublists that are easier to manage and understand.

Identify easy wins4


We recommend wrapping up the discovery process with a few key deliverables:

• A vision statement with clear objectives for the cloud migration project over the next one, three and five years. This should be able to answer the questions in Tip #1 and, more important, articulate the business value.

• A roadmap that clearly identifies capabilities and tasks for moving forward.

• A solution architecture that describes how the solution should look when it’s fully implemented.

These deliverables provide guidance for people working on the project. They also help business leaders and other stakeholders understand what’s being done and why it’s so important.

The vision statement lays out the organization’s long-term objectives for the project. It should list any challenges identified during the discovery process, along with possible solutions for these challenges.

The roadmap basically says, “All right, we’ve identified the strategy and set out possible approaches. Here’s how we’ll execute this work and achieve all the critical milestones.”

The implementation plan goes one level deeper, listing specific actions for the project. For example, if Slalom is migrating an application, it specifies exactly how the application will be moved, and how the Boomi platform will be used to integrate it with other key applications.

There is also a solution architecture deliverable that builds on the vision statement and roadmap. This should describe what the organization will achieve when the implementation is complete:

• What will the end-state architecture look like?

• How will the development and operations teams interact?

• What’s the impact on the business, and what benefits will the organization receive?

A good solution architecture should be able to answer these questions, setting up the organization for success.

Write it down5


Cloud migration projects are inherently complex, involving people, processes and technology. Success requires planning, including identifying goals, obstacles and solutions. And, critically, cloud migration requires agile practices, enabling teams to quickly show progress and continuously sync their work to the latest requirements.

Your cloud migration work should focus first on easy wins – the tasks that can be accomplished most easily while delivering and demonstrating the greatest benefit.

The early stage of any migration should also include documentation, laying out goals, a project roadmap and a solution architecture — the project’s blueprint for realizing its goals.

Plan to succeed

If you’re working on a cloud migration project, you should be thinking about Agile development practices. Why? Because the cloud depends on agile development.

There’s a big benefit to adopting agile processes: They streamline cloud migration, helping your organization get to the cloud faster and innovate more easily once you’re there. But there are things you need to know before getting started.

Cloud applications are almost always built and updated using agile practices. This means being in a continuous state of evolution. If you are planning to integrate agile practices into your enterprise architecture, your developers and IT operations teams need to be tightly coupled (or working together as a DevOps team), integrating and developing at the same pace.

So, to make cloud migration work, make sure you and the stakeholders on your migration team really understand what Agile means. And make sure everyone is prepared to adopt it across your organization. Otherwise, you’ll have the development team releasing code every two weeks and the operations team deploying it every three to six months.

At the same time, recognize that adopting agile practices is realistically a gradual process — a journey, not a transition you are going to make over a week, a month or a year.

The following tips will help you adopt (and become) Agile and bring essential speed to your cloud migration efforts.

Making Cloud Migration Work: 5 Tips for Adopting Agile Practices

CHAPTER 2


Are you unfamiliar with agile development? Here’s a crash course.

Typically, most companies using traditional waterfall development methodologies spend months on designing and planning a product release, followed by months of development, followed by months of testing, and then finally releasing software that might or might not turn out to meet the requirements specified all those months v(or even years) ago.

Alternatively, an organization practicing agile development begins with a minimum viable product (MVP) — the minimum needed to create a “testable” product or service. Once that MVP is built, features and extensions are added after short development “sprints,” which typically last two weeks each. Developers continuously work through “burn-down” lists of the most critical features or corrections to code.

All phases of software development are active at once: planning, developing, testing and release. Software is continuously developed and delivered to the market, enabling an organization to more quickly address market requirements and seize new market opportunities.

Agile brings speed. And speed is king in our cloud-filled digital era.

Understanding Agile Development


Start with helping your organization confront the basic fact: If you’re adopting the cloud, you need to adopt agile development and agile operations as well. Why? Because applications, including major software as a service (SaaS) applications like Salesforce and SaaS application suites like Office 365, are updated continually.

With cloud applications changing so quickly, you and your organization can’t afford to stick with waterfall development processes. In six months, a cloud application that’s updated on a bimonthly sprint schedule has been updated 12 times. It’s likely that features and interfaces that a waterfall project depends on will have changed in that time.

With their biweekly updates, cloud apps and mobile apps are now setting the metronome for your entire IT organization’s release schedule. To keep up, you need to follow agile practices.

Recognize that cloud services require Agile1


Because agile methodologies are usually first adopted in engineering departments, many organizations make the mistake of thinking of Agile as something that matters only to engineering teams. But those engineering teams will quickly hit a roadblock if the operations team isn’t ready to deploy software releases at the end of a sprint.

The features and enhancements included in those releases should almost always be vetted and shaped by the product management team. Therefore, if product management isn’t already responsible for managing the release cadence, they should be involved in the process, too. How about customer support? They need to be apprised of the features and exceptions included in the latest sprint as well.

Once the engineering team adopts agile practices, the rest of the organization needs to follow suit. There are big advantages to the whole organization becoming agile. Collaboration and teamwork become more effective — and they must be in order to manage and coordinate the changes that are occurring so quickly.

The organization overall becomes much more responsive to customers, introducing features and fixes in a fraction of the time required by waterfall practices. And the organization’s cloud operations become faster and much more efficient.

Adopt Agile as a company-wide initiative2


Does adopting Agile seem daunting?

That’s an understandable reaction, but keep in mind that adopting agile practices is not a one-day workshop or a Gantt chart milestone. The evolution to Agile will likely take months or even years. It ends only when your organization is in a state of continuous learning and improvement.

We recommend that you adopt a formal plan for going agile, and that plan should include regularly scheduled training sessions and milestones. You’ll probably want to start small, focusing on specific teams and projects, and then expand from there. If you adopt the “easy wins” strategy mentioned in our previous checklist, then the benefits of Agile should soon be evident to the organization overall.

Overwhelmed? Take a deep breath. It’s a journey, not a pole-vaulting competition. You’ll get there, and you’ll reap rewards along the way.

For Slalom’s insights on transforming organizations with agile practices, see Slalom’s Approach to Agile Transformation.

Embrace Agile as a journey, not a discrete activity3

https://www.slalom.com/insights/business-agility-lasts

https://www.slalom.com/insights/business-agility-lasts


Because agile practices involve developers, QA engineers, DevOps engineers, executives, project managers and product managers at the very least, it’s a good idea to make sure that all these stakeholders receive training.

Executives don’t necessarily need to know the intricacies of development burn-down lists, but they should understand the overall principles and processes. After all, tasks and deadlines related to these processes will likely start showing up on their calendars.

If you bring in consultants, be sure that they involve your internal teams every step of the way. The last thing you want is for the consultants you’ve hired to hand over binders of process descriptions and inscrutable charts at the end of their engagement as they bid you farewell.

Consultants should work with developers, operations staff and business leaders (at a minimum), and all stakeholders should be involved in training and decision-making during the course of the engagement. Business leaders might be unfamiliar with Agile’s comparatively rapid-fire style of development and release. They might need help rethinking strategies and tactics not only to adapt to Agile but also to fully take advantage of it.

Train DevOps teams and business leaders as you go4


When it comes to adopting agile practices and moving to the cloud, you can learn from the example of Michel Lotito (1950-2007), who was also known as Monsieur Mangetout (“Mr. Eat-All”). Lotito was a French entertainer famous for eating unusual objects such as shopping carts and bicycles.

His magnum opus was devouring an entire Cessna 150 aircraft, which he cut into tiny pieces and consumed over the course of several years. That turns out to be the only way you can eat an airplane (not that we recommend trying): cut the plane into tiny pieces and wash down a piece or two daily.

The prospect of consuming an entire airplane is daunting, but by breaking the problem into little pieces, Lotito was able to succeed at something others would not have even dared try.

You can take the same approach to cloud migration and agile practices that Lotito took to eating his airplane. Break your transformation into little pieces and tackle them one at a time, day after day. In this way, what seems impossible is quite achievable.

It takes commitment, a plan and steadily working toward your goal. But little by little, you will get there. And one day, you will look around and have a fully agile organization capable of taking on anything the cloud era demands.

Learn how to “Eat an Airplane”5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito

https://go.slalom.com/how-to-eat-an-airplane

https://go.slalom.com/how-to-eat-an-airplane


Migrating to the cloud means transitioning to a new model for IT operations — a model based on speed, flexibility and scalability. And agile practices make this new model possible.

Adopting agile practices begins with an understanding that they ultimately involve the entire organization. When a company’s software evolves rapidly, so do its products, services and operations. Agility in software development soon requires agility in sales, marketing, finance, logistics and customer support.

These are sweeping changes, but they don’t occur overnight. It’s a gradual transition.

With a clear plan, effective training, and a sense of purpose that combines the right balance of boldness and common sense, organizations can make this transition to Agile relatively smooth, boosting their productivity and effectiveness.

The transformation soon reaches partners and customers, who benefit from the organization’s increased responsiveness. Productivity, effectiveness, speed – not a bad strategy for flourishing in a fast-paced global economy.

Fast and Agile Wins the Race

Perhaps the most important of all for cloud migration is this: think big.

Cloud migration involves the entire organization, from development teams to the executive suite. It will transform the daily work of many people, including business leaders who should be involved in the project from the beginning. And all those affected employees will need to be trained, so training should be part of the process.

New software, new processes, training – employees are likely to wonder what all this is for. It’s important to articulate the “why” of cloud migration.

What’s the organization trying to achieve? How will people benefit? Articulate the reasons for migrating in the first place, so that employees welcome this change, rather than resist it.

Ready to dive in? Here are five best practices for keeping your cloud migration project on track.

5 Best Practices for Any Cloud Migration Project

CHAPTER 3


In any organization, IT will obviously lead cloud migration projects. But much like we already discussed regarding agile practices, it’s best to treat cloud migration as an enterprise-wide initiative rather than simply as an engineering project.

The initiatives should involve developers, operations staff and business leaders at every stage. Don’t attempt to make this a siloed project, even if the bulk of the workload falls to IT.

The success of any cloud migration project depends on multiple teams working well together. Whatever engineers build, operations staff will deploy and business users will use. All these teams need to be involved from the beginning.

Taking this enterprise-wide approach goes back to the idea of accountability. On every cloud migration project that Slalom works on, it makes sure the client’s team members are included on the project’s delivery team so that everyone’s working together as a single team. Slalom and the client are both accountable for the project outcome. Working together, they can migrate applications and improve business results for the organization overall.

Treat cloud migration as an enterprise-wide project1


A second best practice builds on the first. Team-building is actually an end, not just a means. Make building a new delivery team one of the major goals of your project.

From the start, think of any cloud migration project as having at least two major goals. The first, of course, is migrating a specific application or business area from on-premise technology to cloud technology.

This migration might involve simply porting an application to a new environment and then integrating the application with other applications and services to provide business continuity.

Or it might be something more complex, involving multiple cloud applications and integrations, along with data governance and redesigned workflows that bring efficiency and increased productivity to multiple departments. Simple or complex, migration always includes design and integration work.

The second goal is to help the organization develop a self-sustaining product engineering organization that can work productively with other teams across the enterprise — on this project and on future projects, too.

Every cloud migration project should either initiate or support the development of an effective software delivery team. If the project undermines the development of self-sustaining teams, then it’s time to rethink how the project is being organized and managed.

The best projects not only change code, they change the organization itself, making it more agile, cohesive and productive.

Make building new delivery teams part of the project 2

https://boomi.com/platform/hub/

https://boomi.com/platform/flow/


When managing any large, complex project, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Task lists, deadlines and milestones are all important, but three months into a difficult project, living just with task lists and milestones can be emotionally taxing.

Throughout the cloud migration project, remind people working on the project what the end goal is and why it matters. Also, remind them how this project contributes to the organization’s core values and strategic goals.

Does your organization value serving its customers? Delivering the best product in the market? Solving a pressing problem in your industry? Remind your team how the cloud migration project helps the organization address these foundational business goals.

As a recent Gallup study points out, the purpose of a project is especially important to Millennials, who now are now the largest generation in the workforce. The study notes, “Compensation is important and must be fair, but it’s no longer the driver. The emphasis for this generation has switched from paycheck to purpose — and so must your culture.”

Emphasize the “why”3

https://news.gallup.com/reports/189830/e.aspx

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/11/millennials-largest-generation-us-labor-force/


Document as you go, but emphasize hands-on training rather than multi-hundred-page manuals of technical documentation.

Those thick tomes tend to waste time twice: They take forever to compile, and employees devote no time to reading them. In too many cases, they end up being simply “shelfware”: trophies to the complexity of the project, but ultimately not that useful.

It’s better to provide hands-on training as you go, and to provide short, easily digested instructions for specific tasks. You might consider slide decks or even recorded screen captures as part of documentation, too.

Of course, documentation for the project overall should include goals, steps, phases, etc. — the roadmap materials discussed earlier in this ebook. That information provides useful context and background for the short, to-the-point documentation that you should create and deliver throughout the project and at the project’s end.

One advantage of a low-code, drag-and-drop integration tool like the Boomi integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is that it’s largely self-documenting. Documentation becomes easier when you have a graphical interface, reusable components and dashboards like those in the Boomi platform.

You can look at an integration design on the screen and understand pretty quickly what the integration is doing: where it’s getting data, how the data is being transformed and where the data is going.

Teach team members without burdening them4

https://boomi.com/platform/



You’ve migrated a key application to the cloud and integrated the application with other key components in your enterprise architecture. You’ve documented the team’s work, and you can explain to upper management how this migration project fits into the organization’s overall cloud strategy and corporate goals. Now what?

Whatever happens, stay engaged. Don’t disband the teams you’ve put in place. Keep your new cross-departmental delivery teams intact, and keep evolving.

If your organization is healthy and growing, your enterprise architecture isn’t going to remain static. It’s going to continue evolving, involving new integrations, new data transformations and new workflow automation projects. Before long, you may find yourself modifying or extending the very application or service you’ve just migrated.

Integration isn’t an occasional activity. For any cloud-first enterprise, it’s an ongoing practice. Integration enables the organization to continue innovating, adding and upgrading applications and services as part of a larger digital transformation to deliver the best products and services possible.

Stay engaged5


Organizations move to the cloud to become faster, more efficient and more agile.

These are broad changes, and they require thinking more expansively in terms of scope – all the departments and teams affected, and all the training and new processes (and time) those departments and teams will require — plus, what integrations and changes need to be made now, and what will likely need to be made in the future.

By adopting a cloud-first mindset, an organization prepares itself to innovate continuously. It readies its IT teams to integrate whatever new capabilities will enhance its new cloud architecture. And it prepares its end users to take advantage of greater connectivity, speed and efficiency.

Following best practices for cloud migration not only gets the migration job done, it also helps transform the organization itself, priming it to compete more effectively and innovate more successfully.

Cloud-First for Digital Transformation

Together, Slalom and Boomi have helped hundreds of organizations migrate to the cloud. Often, this means moving from on-premise applications and data storage to applications and storage running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), perhaps the industry’s most popular cloud hosting platform.

In a typical AWS migration project, a customer will migrate on-premise data to an AWS data lake, then build a pipeline in AWS to transform the data and move it to a data warehouse, where it can be accessed for business intelligence through applications like Tableau or Qlik.

But there are lots of other scenarios where AWS can be helpful, including using Amazon S3 for data storage, running serverless computing with Amazon Lambda or running a relational database with Amazon RDS.

Whether your AWS plans include data lakes and data warehouses or a different strategy, here are some key tips for making your migration to AWS a success.

5 Tips for Making Your AWS Migration a Success

CHAPTER 4

https://www.slalom.com/

https://aws.amazon.com/

https://aws.amazon.com/

https://www.tableau.com/

https://resources.boomi.com/customer-case-studies/qlik-software

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/?nc2=h_m1

https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/?c=9&pt=2

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/?c=9&pt=2


Most AWS deployments begin with “lift and shift,” moving an on-premise application or capability to AWS and replicating on-premise services in the cloud. But this kind of straightforward replication doesn’t realize the full potential of the cloud for speed, scalability and efficiency. So plan to make adjustments and design changes after the lift-and-shift phase is complete.

The good thing about this? Once you’re operating in the cloud, changing architectures and systems is easy. You haven’t had to invest in new hardware. Modern cloud systems are highly configurable. You can make changes and additions to cloud services, relatively quickly and easily.

Develop a multiphase plan to realize the full potential of your AWS investment1


When you ran your IT operations on-premise, you knew where the code resided, and you knew how to manage it.

Even with a low-code development platform running in the cloud, you’re still going to need some code to integrate with other on-premise systems and to run your AWS services. Plan for this code up front. Write and test as much of it as possible before you lift and shift.

You’ll likely have to write and manage far less code than you would with legacy on-premise systems, so overall, your development and code management workload should decrease.

Remember that, even with platform as a service (PaaS) and AWS Lambda, you’ll need to write and manage code2


AWS services are highly durable and highly available. Nonetheless, it’s important to have an availability and disaster recovery strategy, so that you’re always prepared for that rare but potentially business-critical service degradation or outage.

You’ll want to know ahead of time how you’re going to deploy across regions for availability and data locality. What’s your data retention policy for data stored in S3? What’s your cross-region replication strategy? Will running services without SLAs be reliable enough? If you’ve adopted SLAs, are they sufficient?

Plan for regional outages and disasters ahead of time. They’re rare, but you want to ensure your applications and data remain accessible even when rarities occur.

Develop an availability and disaster recovery strategy before you deploy3

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=129742


To access AWS, you’ll need an AWS account. Most organizations use multiple accounts. It’s worth thinking about how you’ll manage accounts before your AWS deployment gets too large.

You can set up separate accounts for individual business units, regions and so on. You can also create accounts for the different phases of IT activity. You can have accounts for development, quality assurance (QA) and operations.

Regardless of how you choose to set up your AWS accounts, it’s important that people know which account to log in to. You need to understand who’s responsible for each service running on AWS.

You want to avoid a situation in which services are running unattended and no one knows who the services belong to or why they are running. Meanwhile, the meter is spinning. Fortunately, tagging is one good way to identify service users.

In general, you want your account structure to replicate your organization, as long as the account structure doesn’t become too complex. AWS includes a service called AWS Organizations to help with policy-based account management for enterprises with lots of AWS accounts. If you think you’ll have many AWS users, you might want to investigate the Organizations service.

Develop an AWS account strategy, too4

https://aws.amazon.com/organizations/


Using a low-code, cloud-based integration platform streamlines development and integration. If you move to AWS and find you have to make adjustments, working in a low-code platform makes them quick and easy.

Optimally the platform should also include data quality management, so you can create golden records and ensure data consistency and availability. You don’t want to have to enforce data quality standards and data governance as an afterthought.

Boomi’s integration platform as a service (iPaaS) offers rapid, low-code development for integration along with a master data hub for data quality and data governance, which is why Slalom often recommends the Boomi platform to clients for AWS migration projects. Together, AWS and Boomi offer enterprises a fast, agile and cloud-based way of handling critical IT challenges.

Use a modern integration platform to speed development time5




In a recent survey, 68 percent of large companies said they were running applications on AWS,15 percent were experimenting with doing so, and another 7 percent were planning to do so. AWS is popular because it’s a fast, powerful and efficient public cloud platform.

By following the best practices presented here, IT organizations can ensure their adoption of AWS goes as smoothly as possible.

These best practices are rooted in practicality. Plan ahead, keeping in mind that even with the automated features of AWS, you’ll still need to write and manage code. You’ll still need a disaster recovery plan, and you’ll need to think about managing accounts for ease of use, financial accounting and operational efficiency.

And you’ll still need to integrate applications and data, so adopting a cloud-based integration platform like the Boomi iPaaS will make that integration fast and efficient – exactly the qualities that led you to adopt AWS in the first place.

AWS: Popular and Powerful

https://www.zdnet.com/article/top-cloud-providers-2018-how-aws-microsoft-google-ibm-oracle-alibaba-stack-up/

https://boomi.com/

Cloud migration is an essential strategic initiative that businesses of all sizes must embark on to remain competitive.

As this ebook shows, there are road-tested best practices for taking on this vital task and emerging with a stronger, more agile enterprise architecture. If successful, cloud migration can transform your organization for this rapidly evolving digital era.

The work begins before any new applications are deployed or new code is written. By putting together a roadmap and bringing together a cross-disciplinary team, IT organizations can lay the foundation for successful cloud migration.

Cloud migration, ultimately, is an opportunity to modernize: to take advantage of more intuitive and nimble applications built on an equally flexible and efficient computing infrastructure.

By adopting low-code platforms like the Boomi iPaaS for integrating applications and automating workflows, IT leaders can ensure their organizations keep up with the evolution of cloud technologies now and in the future.

By investing in people, processes and technology, businesses can make cloud migration the catalyst for driving digital transformation, emerging as stronger, more agile and more innovative organizations.

Migrate to the Cloud, Transform Your Organization

CONCLUSION


34

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