The difference between cloud failure and success

Recently, we were asked to conduct a discovery exercise for one of our clients. The goal was to understand as much as possible about the IT estate, data and customer and staff dependencies on the services delivered by the client, to allow an orderly migration of its services.

Our discovery team included principal and solution architects, technical architects specialising in infrastructure, lead engineers and a business analyst.

You might be surprised to see a business analyst being part of the pre-migration discovery team as, at first glance, this type of research might seem to be a purely technical task. However, a business analyst is a valuable asset to have on this team, helping to provide an insightful, holistic pre-migration report.

As the number of cloud migrations we have undertaken in recent years has grown massively, we have seen the importance and value in approaching each delivery in a consistent manner, but still retaining the ability to pivot based on unique customer requirements. Our cloud team has written many blogs on the importance of cloud strategy, business cases and the building blocks of successful cloud migrations, but it is worth re-emphasising how critical the discovery phase is to the overall migration.

In a pre-migration discovery phase, several things need to be explored and documented:

• WHAT systems are there?

• WHO is using them?

• HOW are the users accessing them?

• WHAT data is generated within identified systems?

• WHERE is the data stored?

• WHERE, HOW and WHEN is the data transferred?

We also need to ask WHY, why do we need this system, why do we have to keep this data, why do we have to transfer this data etc. as this helps to discover new systems or areas and help identify potential optimisations that can be introduced during the migration.

Below is an excerpt from a mind map that we used in our project. The more we learned about our client's "ecosystem", the more questions we added to our list and the mind map kept growing throughout the project.

The teams responsible for cloud migrations are comprised of mostly technologists, with a great mix of architects, platform and software engineers bringing deep experience across cloud platforms, traditional infrastructure and enterprise software. However, the involvement of a business analyst during the discovery phase allows the team to fully understand the customer’s ways of working, their cloud strategy (if they already have one) and how they can make the best use of cloud technology to allow them to meet their business goals. Understanding the customer’s technology in isolation does not give a complete picture, and indeed simply working with them to understand their business operations and goals will not necessarily ensure a successful cloud migration.

The business analyst plays a pivotal role within the wider team to ensure that the non-technical requirements to support the customer’s business are factored into both the cloud solution and the migration execution itself. A fully rounded team considers both the business and the technology, so it is important that a business analyst is involved from the start of the discovery. They are responsible for shaping the discovery and building the foundations for the engineers to do their job comprehensively. It is the analyst’s job to ask questions, analyze the answers and document them, making sure that everything that has been brought to light has been explored and evaluated by the technical specialists.

In many cases, the business analyst will work closely with the customer to understand who we need to engage within the wider organisation, help engage them in a modern way using user research, arrange and deliver workshops, and support both the delivery manager and the technologists to ensure that all relevant information is captured before the migration is delivered.

Depending on the complexity of the project, the discovery may be undertaken in one block over a pre-defined number of weeks or sometimes we will undertake a “rolling” discovery, where the business analyst will work ahead of the migration team starting. This ensures that any required information is captured in a Just-in-Time basis, allowing another migration phase to continue just after it.

By including a business analyst in the pre-migration discovery phase, you get a connection between business and technical needs that helps build a structured approach to the discovery. Doing this helps us to minimize the risk of omitting critical areas and ensure that a thorough, pre-migration report is delivered to enable you to be successful with your cloud migration.

If you're ready to make the move to public cloud but don't know where to start, or have started but need help completing the journey, then Kainos can help, drawing on the breadth of experience we have of designing, building, modernising and delivering services on the public cloud. To learn more about our cloud services and to speak to a cloud expert click here.