Cloud computing as a key technology trend is growing at an unprecedented pace. According to Gartner, 90% of all organizations will be using cloud services in some form by 2022. Enterprises in recent years are recognizing the importance of migrating to the cloud to evolve their digital strategies and COVID-19 has further accelerated the journey to the cloud for quick and effective digitization.
Corporate data centers, though an integral part of the organization’s overall IT systems in a limited capacity, no longer meet the growth requirements or business strategies of most organizations.
Enterprises are trying to reduce their fixed costs and align their cost structures with changing consumer preferences and business demand in the new age. Most companies therefore prefer to divest non-core assets and adopt an asset light business model for enhanced operational agility.
Consider this: For the IT department, the single largest fixed cost (except licenses) is operating and maintaining the data center (DC) facilities, followed closely by IT assets such as servers, storage, backup devices and network equipment. Together, these costs can account for 40-60% of total cost of operations. Organizations are therefore looking to shift their traditional in-house IT systems and applications to the cloud to leverage a variety of benefits including increased efficiency, enhanced agility and scale and better cost management.
Impediments to exiting legacy data center
Exiting a data center and making changes to large-scale operations is fraught with multiple challenges. A typical data center commitment includes a lock-in period of around 5 to 10 years. This can severely impact the organization’s growth prospects as the digital world increasingly moves to OpEx-based, cloud-only subscription models. Organizations also need to choose between public, private and hybrid cloud strategies based on their requirements and what works for them.
While cloud computing enables speed, agility and easy integration across platforms and devices, the nature and complexity of managing the service depends on various factors.
Some of the most common obstacles involved in exiting corporate data centers include:
- Protecting existing investments and working around contractual obligations on the existing data center
- Financial constraints limiting CapEx investments in the migration program and the problem of dual costs of maintaining the data center while migrating to the cloud
- Selection of the appropriate cloud strategy and platform after a careful assessment of the existing application portfolio and organizational requirements in the long run
- Risk of data loss during migration
- Security concerns, especially around confidential company, and customer information
- Interruption to mission-critical applications during workload migration, rationalization, and consolidation
- Ensuring architectural best practices when migrating to the cloud for long term stability and agility of the business
Each cloud management platform comes with its unique strengths and advantages, and integration between platforms and tools can be a complex task. This is influenced by the size of the organization, the scale of infrastructure deployed, number of sites and machines and OSs installed, the volume of data the firm deals with on a regular basis, software and applications used and the complexity of their processing requirements.
Exiting the DC also requires the mapping, managing and orchestration of all related tools and applications, and new and legacy systems for smooth performance. Integrating existing systems, external enterprise management software, configuration of storage and network resources, integrating data sources and service catalogs all add to the challenge of cloud transformation and management. These factors impact the migration timeframe – complete migration to the cloud could take anywhere from six months to a couple of years, depending on the size and complexity of the organization’s operations.
Seamless migration with Wipro-AWS Data Center Exit Program
Wipro has been at the forefront of the data center exit program, working with multiple enterprises to migrate workloads such as applications, websites, databases, storage, physical or virtual servers, or entire data centers to cloud. AWS and Wipro jointly offer the Data Center Exit Program, which is a cost-neutral, global program that mitigates financial factors related to legacy data center move to help customers achieve their desired migration to the AWS cloud. This program delivers:
Financial benefits
- Assisting in buy back and lease back of DC facilities & IT assets, minimizing penalties by optimizing customer contract terms, and providing credit and investment options to mitigate early termination
- Providing platform credits for decommissioned assets to subsidize migration bubble costs
Qualitative benefits
- Providing flexibility to the business by eliminating the pressure of capacity planning
- Enabling self-service on demand with faster provisioning
- Enabling immediate cash in hand for qualified customers
Operational benefits
- Strategizing an integrated plan for a smooth migration and DC exit for minimized downtime
- Facilitating a holistic approach to application and workload migration for agility and scale
- Divesting IT assets aligned with the migration plan, thus minimizing dual capacity and reducing costs
Partnering through transformation with Wipro’s E2E DC Exit Framework
Wipro’s DC Exit framework with BoundaryLess Enterprise enables the development of architecture and assessment support to design organization-specific cloud strategies and boundary less consumption of services. Wipro offers holistic services that cover the complete application lifecycle services in the cloud – from cloud migration to security, DevOps automation to managed services.
