How to develop a world-class blueprint for your cloud transformation

I think a key thing that everyone in the cloud world agrees on is that there is no set approach or set timescale for digital migration.

What you do, when you do it, and how you do it will depend entirely on your company’s appetite for digitisation, the state of your current IT, and your strategic goals. Your business is as unique as you are. It can seem completely overwhelming to follow the crowd, but following a blueprint that’s based on best practice and experience helps ensure success.

While there is no one way to go digital, using a proven and repeatable framework will ensure you can strategically move away from the legacy, and build a path to digital adoption in a structured, assured and repeatable fashion that is guided and assessed by experts.

What should a world-class blueprint include?

1. Legacy app migration

One of the main processes our customers tend to worry about is migration of legacy applications. How do I get these into the cloud in a reliable way? Perhaps more importantly: What if I’m not ready to put them in the cloud? This is a common concern; many companies are not prepared to migrate legacy apps for all sorts of very good reasons. But if you adopt a framework for digitising your organisation, it will give you the necessary foundation to build upon.

By placing your legacy infrastructure and workloads into a carrier-neutral cloud-rich facility, you will be able to reshape your transition plans and focus on which elements work best for your business. And that gives you flexibility, agility and performance.

2. Network optimisation

For those that are ready to begin digital migration, one of the key steps of any blueprint framework is network optimisation. This is about ensuring that the network topology is appropriate for a digitally-driven business and making sure users are closer to the data they need – whether that be on a physical piece of hardware in one of their sites, or in the cloud. By shortening the path between user and data, you can speed up the response, which ultimately improves quality of experience, and avoids the cost of having to backhaul traffic to a central location.

What else needs to be considered?

It’s important to remember that once you enter a carrier-neutral facility, you’re entering a rich set of ecosystems comprising suppliers, partners, other customers… a whole online world to which you’re intrinsically, digitally connected. You need to understand who else is in your digital supply chain, and who they’re connected to themselves, not least for issues such as compliance. This also has an impact on migration of your legacy applications: What other elements will your apps be interconnecting with?

But just as importantly, taking an interconnection-driven approach provides amazing opportunities for growth and innovation.

So, while there’s no set way to digitise your business, there certainly is a reliable approach and framework, through trusted partners who can assist you with your strategy. That’s precisely why Equinix has developed a blueprint for cloud transformation: the Interconnection-Oriented Architecture (IOA). And why we work ‘hand in glove’ with our partner BT to execute that approach and build a cloud management and delivery model that works for you.

To learn more about how Equinix and BT could help you to build a close ecosystem get in touch.