Cloud & Security Conference 2023 – OpenText’s Alvin Barnard explains the cloud migration process
Alvin Barnard, Presales Consultant at OpenText, featured on a panel at the MyBroadband Cloud & Security Conference 2023.
Barnard has a demonstrable history of success working for the world’s top companies in the ICT industry.
These companies include HP Software, Micro Focus, and CA Technologies — which is owned by Broadcom.
Barnard is highly skilled in Systems Management, IT Service Management, presales, ITIL, and automation.
These skills and his excellent work ethic have made Barnard a key part of the OpenText team.
Panel discussion
On the panel, Barnard explained the process of migrating to the cloud in the most optimal way for your business.
He said the first step of a successful cloud migration is discovering all of your resources — both in terms of hardware and software.
He highlighted the example of the University of Milan, which worked with OpenText-owned company Micro Focus to discover 150 servers on its campus.
Micro Focus also helped the University of Milan to update over 100,000 of its hardware and software configurations in just a few months.
Barnard stressed the importance of consolidating these resources into a single portal that provides visibility of all your important business data.
Next, you should analyse these different resources and determine the best solution for each.
This could be:
- Rehosting — Moving the application to a new environment via lift and shift, managed services, or SaaS.
- Refactoring or rearchitecting — Restructuring your code while maintaining its original features and functionality.
- Rebuilding — Rewriting important applications from scratch to ensure the same functionality in a new environment.
- Retaining — Keeping the application in its existing form and location.
- Retiring — Ceasing to use the application and replacing it with a modern alternative if necessary.
When making this decision, you must compare costs with business outcomes.
For example, applications that are not business-critical are often good candidates for either retention or retirement, as the cost of the other “re’s” would not provide enough tangible business value.
Once you have decided on the appropriate solution for each application or resource, you can execute them to generate tangible business value.
Barnard cautioned against using inexperienced migration partners throughout this process as it presents an unnecessary business risk.
“Simple mistakes or miscalculations can cause huge issues,” he said.
“The best migration teams will implement robust permissions systems in your backend to ensure that these mistakes don’t happen, and nothing is exposed that you don’t want to be touched.”
Managing multi-cloud environments
Once you have deployed your new multi-cloud environment, the next step is managing your different applications across their various locations.
This can be extremely challenging if you don’t have the right tools, but he said it is far more straightforward when working with OpenText and Micro Focus.
“If your content is sitting in different applications, and you’re reliant on different vendors, you cannot achieve sufficient internal management,” said Barnard.
The cost of this is significant, Barnard added, highlighting that poor operational processes can waste up to 30% of your cloud spend, and cost businesses on average $126,000 of revenue per hour of downtime.
“In contrast, by aggregating all of your cloud technologies into a single platform, you can easily pinpoint any issues as soon as they appear.”
Barnard said the acquisition of Micro Focus makes OpenText the ultimate partner for all of your IT Operations Management (ITOM) needs, as OpenText can now combine its industry-leading solutions with the extensive catalogue of powerful Micro Focus tools.
For example, Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Management (HCM) and its workflow designer enabled Air France-KLM to boost productivity by 400%.
Likewise, Micro Focus solutions enabled TurkTelekom to gather 30 different technologies as well as performance metrics, topology, and event detections into a single source of truth.
Click here to learn how OpenText can help you with your cloud migration.
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