Introduction
Migrating to the cloud has become one of the most important strategic opportunities for a modern organization. The cloud offers flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, allowing widespread to response to workload changes. With that said, cloud migrations encounter obstacles at unexpected steps—over budget, over time, or the infrastructure and application doesn’t perform well post-migration.
According to a survey provided by Gartner, over 60 percent of cloud migrations are over their budgets or timelines due to poor planning and limited visibility into existing infrastructures. This is why it is critical in cloud migrations.
A well-defined, accurate network inventory documents and provides IT teams the visibility to understand their environments, see dependencies, and make sound decisions on what, when, and how to migrate. Without visibility, cloud migration can feel intimidating–penetrating into an unknown dark as per Slurp’it.
In this article, we will examine how enterprises use network inventory data to produce smarter, more intelligent, and risk-free cloud migration planning.
The Significance of Network Inventory in Cloud Migration Planning
Before a migration takes place, IT teams must be comfortable with the knowledge of what is running in their networks. It provides a launching point, then it identifies every device, application, endpoint, and connection in the existing infrastructure.
Network inventory visibility provides the organization with information to accomplish the following:
➤ Identify what workloads are cloud ready, and what workloads require modernization.
➤ Identify dependencies with on-premises workloads, and their access.
➤ Identify underlying assets that should not be moved to the publicly shared cloud of sharing.
➤ Determine priority workloads based on performance and/or business need.
Absent of a network inventory, an enterprises efforts to plan for cloud migration efforts will be based on old or out-of-date information and assumptions. This results in missing dependencies, excessive downtime, and expensive to rework once workloads were, or are, migrated to the cloud.
Let’s see Frequent Challenges in Cloud Migration Planning
Many enterprises enter the migration journey with a specific business goal, but limited business knowledge of their existing environment as per Slurp’it. Below are the most common challenges encountered by lack of visibility:
- Hidden Dependencies: Applications often rely on many systems, databases, or APIs that would not necessarily be visible. If a service that the application relies on is missed in the migration process, the application is either fails or runs poorly.
- Security Blind Spots: Any untracked devices, or shadow IT, can expose significant vulnerabilities when connected to cloud environments. If the organizations network asset data is incomplete, then there is an increased risk of stack misconfiguration or unauthorized access.
- Overprovisioning/Wast: Without spending the time to understand how much an organization is using its current resource at the moment, organizations often overprovision their cloud resources “just to be safe”. This not only leaves them with inflated operational costs, but also degrades the resources to be used efficiently.
- Compliance Risks: Regulated industries have to comply with strict regulation and it is essential they have strict control over where sensitive data is stored. For poorly documented network assets, the organization will have a harder time ensuring compliance with framework guides like GDPR, HIPAA, or ISO 27001.
In summary, it’s visibility directly addresses the elements above by making the invisible-visible before any migration steps have even occurred as per Slurp’it.
How Network Inventory Improves Cloud Migration Planning
1.Comprehensive Asset Visibility:
If well maintained, it will serve as a single source of truth for the entire infrastructure, identifying everything physical and virtual, IPs, ports, and software versions.
This transparency assists IT teams in determining which systems should migrate to the cloud, which should stay on-premises, and which can be removed from service. Eliminating uncertainty allows companies to develop migration roadmaps driven by actual data.
2. Dependency Mapping for Smooth Transitions
Dependencies among servers, applications, and services can either be an enabler or a barrier for a migration. Current inventory products use discovery scans or topology mapping to uncover how the systems interact.
For example, if an application depends on an on-prem database for its functionalities, a migration plan can either account for simultaneously moving both the application and the database or configuration of secure hybrid connectivity. This planning approach mitigates downtime, as well as the potential loss of data.
3. Risk and Impact Assessment
Inventory network data can identify the critical and high-risk assets. IT teams can utilize this information to plan the prioritized workloads, test workloads in a sandbox environment, and with input from business partners, ensure systems will be available with an agreed SLA of their traditional legacy environments.
From its data, the process can also provide predictive analysis for estimating how the construction of networks or migration of certain components, servers or applications will affect latency, which will also impact end-user experience.
4. Cost and Resource Optimization
Organizations can analyze it’s data and see which assets are either being underutilized or considered redundant, which will avoid hastily moving portions of the network into the cloud, and mitigate network sprawl.
According to IDC, companies with pre-migration assessments and asset inventory can reduce their cloud costs by approximately 30 percent, most significantly by avoiding redundancy and excess virtual machines and physical servers.
5. Improving Security and Compliance
Inventory tools can be used ahead of a migration to find outdated or insecure configurations, unsupported operating systems, and outdated firmware before even beginning to reengineer systems into the cloud as per Slurp’it.
Identifying configurations that are insecure or unsupported will prevent the migration from going forward with those devices and rebuilding that vulnerability in the cloud network. For compliance, maintaining a detailed inventory provides traceability, such as where the data now resides, how it flows, and whether there are match-up controls in the cloud environment to protect the data.
Automation and intelligent tool-sets
It is nearly impossible to manually collect and maintain data for a significant enterprise network. It is vital that automation is part of pre-migration planning in cloud migration.
Current and modern management systems rely on automation, Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) analytics to get to realtime visibility. The management system is designed to maintain updated inventory records as new devices join the network or change configurations, which is important throughout the migration processes.
➤ It provides important automated functionalities, which include:
➤ Automated discovery scans across hybrid architecture environments,
➤ Dependency mapping and visualization,
➤ Integration with IT Service Management (ITSM) or Configuration Management Databases (CMDB),
➤ Policy-based alert notifications for compliance or configuration issues.
These intelligent tracking devices demonstrate to IT leadership they can abandon manually tracking spreadsheet models and become more fluid in adjusting to important data for decisions for the future migrating environment.
The feasible steps to take advantage of it for cloud migration include,
Step 1: Audit the current environment
Inventory the current enterprise network with a full discovery scan of every connected device today. Be sure to capture metadata such as configurations, operating system or firmware versions, and network paths to help support important planning information.
Step 2: Classification and Prioritization of Assets
Classify and categorize your assets in groups that account for business criticality, performance level, SLAs, and security sensitivity, which will aide in the determination of which of those systems may potentially engineer into cloud systems versus those that need to be replaced or substantially modified.
Step 3: Dependency Mapping
Document those dependencies using the automated dependency mapping of a system or tool, which will understand the relationships between applications and services. Organizing the migration waves, to match up with dependency information, will also dictate the migration order of reengineering systems in the cloud.
Step 4: Identify Gaps for Security and Compliance
Review the inventory identification list that identifies unsupported software, weak configuration details, or critical unpatched vulnerabilities or threat points before the migration process begins. Remediating this gaps before migrating provides the basis that a threat does not breach after migration.
Step 5: On-going Monitoring and Updating
Cloud migration is not a once-and-done transition. As the infrastructure grows, keeping it up to date is important. On-going monitoring will give you visibility into hybrid or multicloud environments after the migration is completed.
Strategic Insight for IT Leaders
For CIOs, CTOs, or network architects, a network inventory is not just a technical checklist, it is a strategic approach to ensure successful cloud migration. A network inventory provides the visibility and information needed to confidently plan, and oversee costs, while navigating any unexpected surprises.
In large enterprises, as each department, business unit, and location has a shared infrastructure across numerous data centers and cloud contexts, accurate inventory data turns the migration project from uncertainty and higher risk into an orchestrated, coordinated transition.
A successful cloud migration begins and ends with what you know about your network. A comprehensive network inventory provides enterprises visibility and knowledge of their device operating environments to intelligently, safely, and cost-effectively move workloads. For more information, contact us at Slurp’it!