As organizations embrace cloud technology, many have successfully migrated simpler workloads. However, challenges arise when tackling more complex migrations. Often, these projects falter due to a lack of comprehensive knowledge about the company’s assets and their interconnections within a hybrid environment. This gap in understanding can hinder the identification of interdependencies among applications, infrastructure, and services, exposing organizations to potential risks during migration. The fear of service disruptions or outages can also lead to indecision, causing migration efforts to stall.
For IT teams, achieving full visibility into dependencies and understanding each application’s significance to business operations, service level agreements (SLAs), Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives (RPOs/RTOs), compliance, and security requirements is crucial. Lacking this information can result in hesitation when orchestrating workflows, scheduling migration waves, and confidently executing migrations.
In this discussion, we will explore how TransitionManager equips teams with the insights needed to navigate complex environments, facilitating the analysis, planning, and risk reduction associated with migrations. This post is tailored for migration practitioners and stakeholders seeking efficient strategies for planning, decision-making, and executing data center and cloud migrations.
How TDS Supports Migration Efforts
TDS, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner specializing in cloud and data center migrations, has developed TransitionManager to enhance planning, orchestration, and execution of intricate migrations. TransitionManager offers visual, interactive maps that clarify how assets are interconnected across complex environments. Moreover, its flexible rules engine ensures that decisions align with desired business outcomes.
Over nearly 20 years, the TDS team has utilized TransitionManager to successfully orchestrate complex projects, achieving results that consistently exceed industry standards.
Businesses are rapidly adopting cloud solutions to fulfill the promises of digital transformation (DX). However, effective DX necessitates that IT swiftly adopt and deliver innovative technologies while maintaining a resilient environment and responding to unexpected outages. To achieve these diverse objectives, IT must first undergo a transformation, which hinges on access to relevant and actionable data.
Challenge: Keeping IT Asset Inventory Up-to-Date and Accurate
Despite having numerous specialized tools and abundant data, IT teams often lack access to the necessary information during migrations. Migrations differ from other IT projects, involving collaboration across various teams and business units, each utilizing tools that may not integrate seamlessly.
Successful migrations demand that these tools work together fluidly. TransitionManager integrates with systems throughout every migration phase, enabling data to flow from disparate sources. This integration ensures that teams can access the right information in the right format at the right time, facilitating informed decision-making.
TransitionManager consolidates, normalizes, and aggregates data from configuration management databases (CMDBs), data center infrastructure management (DCIM), custom databases, and file systems into a unified internal repository. Its rules engine optimizes the data ingestion process, capturing essential fields while filtering out irrelevant information from target data sources. Once imported, TransitionManager assesses data quality and performs necessary remediation, producing a comprehensive dependency map of the entire environment. This visualization empowers teams to comprehend asset relationships from a business-centric and application-focused perspective.
Case Study: Gaining Clarity in a Fragmented Environment
One of TDS’s clients, a prominent international insurance firm, had decentralized its IT operations, aligning teams with each of its 12 business units. This structure led to multiple CMDBs, DCIMs, custom databases, and various assessment and performance tools scattered across the organization. Consequently, determining which system contained the most accurate data and identifying missing data points became challenging.
As with many large enterprises, users only had access to specific data sources, and no individual could access all systems. Identifying duplicated data entries was complicated due to inconsistent naming conventions, and varying update intervals further obscured the currency of the information.
To tackle this issue, TDS extracted data from each system and consolidated only the critical data points required for migration into TransitionManager. The Dependency Analyzer feature of TransitionManager produced an interactive map displaying all assets and their dependencies across all hosting environments. This analysis uncovered nearly 1,000 rogue assets with no known dependencies, potentially exposing the organization to unnecessary risks and costs.
Business-Focused, Application-Centric View of Hybrid IT
TDS validated data and application dependencies with subject matter experts (SMEs) in under an hour, achieving superior data quality compared to traditional questionnaire methods. The client initially estimated having 1,000 applications; however, TransitionManager revealed nearly 3,500. Impressed by the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the information in TransitionManager, the client eliminated nine of their twelve systems, consolidating the remaining three within TransitionManager. This consolidation resulted in significant savings on licensing fees and reduced the time previously spent on manual data normalization.
Additionally, the planning and execution stages were completed 25% faster than anticipated, thanks to expedited access to asset information that facilitated better decision-making. For more insights on cloud migration, check out another blog post here.
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