Powering successful cloud migration with MSI

Multi-cloud landscapes are intricate, creating a challenging multi-vendor tableau that must deliver on scalability, agility, collaboration and flexibility to meet business goals in a competitive digital economy.

Digitization has changed the way applications and data are traditionally managed. Software-as-a-service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) have become important pillars of cloud computing, for example. These developments have spawned multiple providers, all of which need to be carefully managed to control costs and optimize services. This is a huge task in itself if you consider that the average enterprise uses around 1,000 plus cloud apps. With Gartner predicting that multi-cloud will be a common strategy for 70 percent of enterprises by next year, it is only going to get bigger.

MSI provides a single point of responsibility for managing your multi-clouds so that you keep control of performance visibility and spend. This frees up your in-house teams to focus on business-generating projects.

Getting the right clouds in place

MSI is designed to make your migration to multi-cloud as easy and smooth as possible. The first step is to find out exactly what you want to do in the cloud and the benefits you expect, so that there is a clear vision and roadmap moving forward.

It is essential to run an audit to find out which applications are most suited to moving to multi-cloud and which cloud vendors suit your needs best. This way multi-cloud design can be shaped to your specific needs by finding the right building blocks to optimize your multi-cloud strategy. It is also a perfect time to see where native cloud applications (NCAs) can be adopted alongside DevOps opportunities.

We can advise you which applications to prioritize for a cloud move and which to hold back to a later date. We outline which applications go best with which type of cloud, be it public, private or hybrid, and which could be transformed using container-as-a-service (CaaS) or function-as-a-service (FaaS), for example.

At this stage, contracts and SLAs are examined and compliancy, governance and security requirements fleshed out. Healthcare and finance are among those industries that have specific compliance obligations that need to be taken into account.

The result is a deployment and cloud migration roadmap where you can clearly visualize when and where workloads are moving to in the cloud – this minimizes risk and the impact on both users and the business.

On the move

The next step is the operational or moving stage. This is where data and server migrations take place. This phase includes setting up environments, governance policies, security layers and network connectivity and defining architectures on all the cloud platforms.

Once at the run stage, you are provided with reporting functionality, a portal and a set of tools that provide you with a single pane of glass on to your IT estate, which supports application changes, incident submissions and more.

Keeping your clouds secure

Security is a complex issue everywhere you look. Orange provides standard default security as part of our MSI program to set up best practices, password policies and so forth. We also provide further options to set up additional security policies and run audits for GDPR compliance, for example.

Optimizing your cloud investment

Multi-cloud makes it easier to provision resources across your organization. Cloud's on-demand nature, however, can make it difficult to manage costs. By sizing, scaling, monitoring and tuning your multi-clouds you can ensure you get the very best performance for your investment.

Orange provides an MSI cost and performance optimization option designed to look at how your workload costs can be reduced, while ensuring your users get maximum performance.

Simplifying multi-cloud

Multi-cloud has an impressive roster of advantages, including business agility, flexibility, increased efficiencies and cost-effectiveness. If its complexity, however, has made you hold back, MSI is the obvious answer. Not just for those who are making their first move to multi-cloud, but also for those who have made the leap and found managing multi-clouds a strain on resources. Especially where the skills gap is biting and in-house competence is lean.

Multisource models, by their very nature, often lack a single point of accountability and effective governance. Having an MSI integrator to orchestrate your multi-clouds provides you with the skill set, transparency and continuous improvement necessary to take your organization forward in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Discover more about Multisourcing Service Integration from Orange Business.