Digital transformation is taking shape in workplaces across the world as businesses look to become more agile and adopt a cloud-first strategy. According to Gartner, it's estimated that 85% of businesses will have a cloud-first narrative by 2025 and 95% of new digital workloads will be cloud-native. GCP helps customers embark on a digital journey to build cloud solutions in an open cloud architecture built for dynamically responding to change. It is important to choose a cloud platform that can quickly migrate existing workloads, often in their existing state before embarking on what Google calls cloudification, in other words, to adapt your application to take advantage of cloud technology.
Google Cloud is regarded as one of the most user-friendly cloud providers, developers and techies enjoy the depth of the platform, and non-technical users find it easy to navigate and explore. Behind the scenes, Google owns all of their regional locations outright and they own the cabling between the datacenters (even those that span oceans). This is a big deal because GCP is not reliant on 3rd party hosting for infrastructure or internal networking.
The benefits to cost are extensive and will keep finance teams happy by switching to a predictable OPEX cost model. There are major savings when leaving on-premise hosting, customers no longer have to pay utility costs, lease rack space, or run a private data center and there is no CAPEX investment in computer hardware.
With GCP, choose from the very latest hardware, SaaS, and PaaS offerings available - tech teams will be up and running in no time. Best of all there is no need for expensive maintenance contracts, hardware repairs, and server maintenance resulting in fewer employees needed to manage the infrastructure.
For many, the biggest obstacle to overcome on the cloud computing journey is migrating existing workloads to the Cloud. There are three major types of migration; Lift and Shift, Improve and Move, or Rip and Replace. The required solution depends on the size of the existing estate, and what the goals of the digital transformation project are. Google Cloud provides numerous technical solutions available to help achieve this goal.
Before embarking on the migration process, ask yourself why you want to migrate to the cloud? To make this decision easier, perform an extensive inventory of the existing on-premise solution, paying particular attention to the dependencies between each application. This initial process might take weeks or months, but accurate fact-finding makes the entire process much smoother. Gather data on the resource utilization of all physical, virtual, and appliances.
Detailed fact-finding creates a greater understanding of the existing infrastructure, the process discovers if cloud migration will work and if it is technically feasible to proceed. Does the cloud support the existing licensing model? (eg, Oracle databases), and most importantly, will all application dependencies be compatible with Cloud Computing? Often headaches surrounding legacy systems, such as ERP solutions or e-commerce systems need to be resolved before Cloud Migration.
Consider which migration path will work for the business and look for potential obstacles such as time constraints, lack of expertise, or how much of a cultural change is needed in the business to make this succeed. GCP has numerous managed services available for migration, perhaps change on-prem databases to a fully managed CloudSQL or BigQuery configuration, or consider migrating existing applications to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and virtual machines (VMs) to Google Compute Engine (GCE). Don't worry If you have already invested significantly into on-premise virtualized environments namely VMware and Hyper-V.
Google has partnered with VMware to create the Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE), making a lift-and-shift of an existing VMware infrastructure simple. It's possible to span on-premise Hosts directly into GCP via a VPN or even over the internet, then complete a simple vMotion to get the workload onto GCP. If you are invested in Microsoft’s virtualized ecosystem, Hyper-V can be nested on cloud instances in GCE.
A digital business ecosystem is an environment that enables seamless integration between businesses with close working relationships. GCP encourages this closer collaboration through its API technology. APIs allow the transfer of data and functionality between trusted sources. In a recent study, it was discovered this approach boosts operational efficiency, improves employee engagement, and empowers businesses to be industry leaders. Business leaders should think beyond traditional partnerships and increase transparency for deeper business relationships.
