This is a continuation of the first part of this article, please go through Journey to Google Cloud – Part -1 before proceeding with this article.
Google Cloud Adoption Framework
Before commencing your migration, you need to evaluate your company’s maturity in adapting to cloud technologies. The Google Cloud Adoption framework serves as a map to determine your business’s IT capabilities, and a guide to where you want to be.
As illustrated further, you can use this framework to evaluate what is needed in filling the gaps in your organization’s readiness for Google Cloud, and develop new capabilities.
The structure evaluates four themes:
Learn—The quality and quantity of your learning programs.
Lead the way— The extent of your leadership’s support to your IT departments for migration to Google Cloud.
Scale — To what extent does your organization uses cloud-native services, and the level of prevailing functional automation?
Secure — Ability to protect your current environment from unauthorized and inappropriate access.
As per your structure, you can be in either of the three following stages for each theme:
Tactical — There are no coherent plans that cover all the personal workloads you have. You are interested in a quick return on the investment and at a small cost of slight disruption to your IT company.
Strategic — There is a plan to create personal workload with future scaling needs in mind. You are interested in the goal of streamlining operations so that they are more efficient in the future as compared to today.
Transforms — Cloud operations run smoothly, and you use the data collected from those operations to improve your IT business. You are interested in making IT division one of the engines of innovation in your organization in the long term.
When you rate the four topics based on three phases, you get a cloud maturity criterion. There is a pattern in each theme, which involves you embracing new technologies when needed, and then working with them in a more strategic manner. This ensures deeper, comprehensive, and consistent training for your teams.
Migration Path
It is important to remember that migration is a journey. You are at point A with your current infrastructure and environment, and you want to reach point B. To get from A to B, you can choose any of the options described above.
There are four stages of your migration:
Evaluation – At this point, you make a thorough assessment and discovery of your existing environment to understand your application and environmental list, identify application dependencies and requirements, perform the total cost of ownership calculations, and establish application performance definitions.
Project – At this point, build the necessary cloud infrastructure to live up to your workloads and plan how you will move applications. This planning includes identity management, organization and project organization, networking, deploying your applications, and developing a priority migration strategy.
Deploy – At this point, you design, implement, and accomplish the deployment process to move workloads to Google Cloud. You will also need to tweak your cloud infrastructure to meet new requirements.
Optimize – At this point, you start fully utilizing cloud-native technologies and capabilities to expand your business’ capabilities for things like performance, scaling, disaster recovery, costs, training, and opening doors for machine-learning artificial intelligence integration.