5 Complexity Indicators for a Successful Cloud Migration

Over the past few years, cloud computing has established itself as a leader in the digital transformation strategies of companies around the world. In fact, Canalys estimates that company spending on cloud infrastructures will increase by 23% worldwide and reach 80 billion dollars this year, and IDC data indicate that the Spanish cloud market will reach an annual growth rate of 21.9% between 2021 and 2025, which means more than 5 billion euros in turnover.

The digital transition to a cloud-based model is commonplace for businesses thanks to its many productivity and efficiency benefits. However, cloud migration is still a process that involves a certain degree of complexity regardless of the type of cloud access and, in fact, this ranks first among the reasons why some companies have not yet taken the step with 37%, followed by cost (34%) and security (32%), according to Unit4 data.

Therefore, to create a successful migration plan, it is essential to understand the level of difficulty, as it is then that the company can map out the implementation strategy.

In this sense, atSistemas, a 100% Spanish technology consultancy, identifies 5 indicators that will help companies to understand the complexity of the cloud migration process.

Number of products and users per product

When migrating to the cloud, one of the main things to consider is the number of applications to be migrated, as well as the number of users per application. Thus, a small migration to the cloud will be much simpler and less costly than a migration of a considerable number of applications. Before starting the process, it is advisable to purge applications that are not critical to the business or that are not being used. The same applies when the number of users to be migrated is high as it directly affects the estimated migration time.

Volumetrics and data size

The number of users and applications to be migrated will in turn affect the size of the data and the migration will therefore be slower and more complex depending on the space occupied by the information. This volume of data comes from different sources, such as the projects themselves, source code repositories, collaborative workspaces, configuration management databases, attachments, among others.

On-premise product versions

Another factor to take into account is the version of the products the company is currently working with. Although everything will depend on the application to be migrated, most of the time it will be necessary to have updated versions in order to successfully migrate to the Cloud.

Commercial and custom-developed complements

The number of add-ons to be migrated is another factor that will determine the degree of complexity, but also their degree of use and importance for the company itself. In this sense, it may be that some of the add-ons do not exist in the cloud environment or that there are alternatives, or that the company has custom-developed add-ons.

For this reason, and once again, it will be important to assess their compatibility with the cloud that is the objective of the migration. There are cases such as Netflix, which in just over 7 years was able to become a cloud-native company by both migrating some of its systems and building new ones, which allowed it to expand in 130 countries as of 2016.

Integrations with other tools

Tool integrations are one of the main challenges for 40% of companies, according to a 2022 report by Mulesoft and Deloitte. But, in the case of the cloud, it is not only important that the applications are compatible with the cloud instance to which the migration is going to take place, but it will also be necessary to identify whether other outbound and inbound tools that the company works with outside the cloud can be integrated with the rest of the ecosystem. Some of these applications may be the corporate user directory or SSO, external database fields or external clients that connect with the API, so if the company has many of these tools, the migration process increases in complexity.

Our expert opinion

“Once all the complexity indicators have been analysed is when the company can decide which path to take in the cloud migration process, but once the migration is done there are still many details to attend to, especially in relation to the development and maintenance of the cloud instance, and that is why we consider it ideal to leave the migration and maintenance in the hands of professionals. From atSistemas we have recently achieved cloud specialisation with Atlassian and we are proud to be the first and only Spanish company to obtain it, as well as the fact that they have placed their trust in us as cloud integrators with a dual role for companies: as support in their decision making throughout the migration process and as a partner of their new business model“, says Mariano Galán, Atlassian Business Line Manager at atSistemas.