HGS Digital

Cloud migration

Bridging the gaps from local to global, and on-prem to cloud

Cloud migrations and digital transformations are inextricably linked

A comprehensive cloud strategy stands critical to every organization’s digital transformation goals.

The needs of modern-day consumers are dynamic. To attract and retain customers, businesses must respond to their demands. Moving to cloud enables businesses to deliver products and services to customers how, when, and where they want. It offers a competitive advantage.

Whether you’re just embarking on your cloud journey or at a cloud cross-roads, we can help make the move from limited to unlimited digital possibilities with precision, speed, and greater certainty.

Our cloud experts can help you navigate murky waters and build a repeatable, successful approach to mobilize all your workloads, teams, and projects.

image of a hand pointing at a digitally rendered cloud icon inside a circle

Our Cloud Accelerator solution provides a secure and operationally efficient cloud ecosystem, allowing companies to focus on what matters

Successful cloud migrations are within reach

We see it all the time. Organizations delay cloud migrations because they’re daunting. They’re resource-constrained, concerned about data security, and unsure of how to start.

At HGS Digital, we help you break overwhelming cloud projects into manageable chunks. We remove barriers to adoption. We align teams. We help you weigh options. We identify integration points. We design and build. We migrate content, applications, and databases.

Along the way, we ensure knowledge transfer to help build your internal skill sets. And we offer services closely related to cloud migration, such as embracing DevOps, augmenting staff and, once live, managing your environment. We offer as-needed and end-to-end cloud services.

Evaluate and plan

Business readiness assessment
Cloud portability analysis
Cloud model evaluation
- IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, private vs. public vs. hybrid
Vendor evaluation
Disaster recovery planning
Monitoring, reporting needs

Migrate and test

Architecture design
Inbuilt tools, methodologies
As-needed development
Infrastructure setup
Migrate workloads
- Applications, databases, content
Testing, go live

Secure and optimize

Data, application governance
Security, compliance
Post-migration testing
Patching, upgrades, etc.
24/7 monitoring service
24/7 managed service
Support service
Performance optimization

Clear the fog associated with cloud migrations

Drawing from 400+ successfully delivered digital engagements, our migrations include (but are not limited to):

Assessing cloud readiness
Choosing the right model: public, private, multi-cloud and/or hybrid
Selecting the right cloud service provider (CSP)
Performing total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis
Building your value proposition and business case
Gaining internal support across:
- BCP and legal
- Security and compliance
- Procurement
- Data governance
- Development and operations

Delivering migration strategies, plans, and services:
- Building out your architecture for scalability, security, and cloud optimization
- Reviewing and/or building a disaster recovery (DR) strategy
- Facilitating DevOps adoption and/or development
- Transferring workloads
- Testing, go lives, training, and optimization
Collaborating with your team to build and deploy a long-term plan for ongoing monitoring, management, support and optimization of your cloud environment

Combining cloud and DevOps improves the CX

Data show that empowering your IT teams with cloud virtualization and DevOps approaches can make your organization more competitive.

96x faster time to restore service during an unplanned outage

A DevOps approach pairs perfectly with cloud migration

Companies often contemplate the cloud when they realize that their systems are no longer meeting needs. Common drivers are a need for capacity, data center consolidation, security requirements, disaster recovery, and pressure to reduce costs and accelerate innovation.

Migrating to the cloud often coincides with the development, implementation, and customization of new critical systems. Moving to the cloud is an opportunity to review processes, especially the interactions between your dev and operations teams.

DevOps is a modern approach to IT development that stresses communication, collaboration, and integration between software developers and IT operations professionals.

In DevOps, the people ultimately responsible for the ongoing operation of a system are actually involved in designing and creating it. DevOps collaboration can have a significant impact on how a company functions, the products that are developed, and customer satisfaction. DevOps emphasizes interaction for continuous improvement.

We’ve assisted many organizations in embracing DevOps, and we’ve discovered that leaders are motivated by largely the same things:

A need to improve the user or customer experience
The increasing use of mobile devices
The increasing complexity of IT infrastructure (e.g., multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, on-prem)
A need to drive greater collaboration
Pressure to release apps more quickly to meet market demand
An intensifying need to develop and deploy cloud-native applications
A growing need to deploy simultaneously across several platforms
A requirement to reduce IT expenditures or maximize budgets

A DevOps environment can align efforts and remove barriers. DevOps promotes partnership to meet shared goals, such as agility, quality, innovation, cost reduction, speed, stability, responsiveness, and security.

Implementing DevOps requires clear change and project management to bring teams on board. It involves the right development tools, prioritization and goal alignment, adoption of an agile approach, and shared key principles (e.g., automation, self-service, customer-focus). We are well versed in leading digital transformation initiatives that bring DevOps goals to fruition.

Our cloud experts expedite projects

Constraints around time and resources, can hinder meeting cloud goals.

Use our seasoned professionals as an extension of your team. We will share our training, certifications, and understanding of cloud product features and cloud service providers (CSPs). Our team includes:

Senior cloud architects
Senior system architects
DevOps architects
Onshore/offshore developers
Business analysts
UX designers
Project and change managers

With a solid understanding of how IT can facilitate excellent customer experiences, our resources willingly share their knowledge of:

AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud
IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
Virtualization, VMware, and Citrix
High availability and disaster recovery principles
Cloud ecosystems and leading cloud emerging technologies
TLS/SSL encryption and key management principles
Networking technologies (e.g., DNS, load balancers, reverse proxies)
Cloud security, multi-factor authentication, and zero hacking

Whether you require all-year-round L1-L3 expert cloud support, resources for specific projects, or short- or long-term staff augmentation to bridge resource gaps, we are here to assist.

FAQs

How do we know it’s the right time to move to cloud?

Our clients typically turn to us when their organizations are making big changes to modernize and stay competitive, such as during mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations; capacity expansion initiatives; overhauls of aging systems; ventures into new markets or geographies; and major new product launches or customer-focused initiatives.

How do we decide what to migrate to the cloud first?

We generally suggest considering the frequency the application/data is used, the number and location of users that will be affected, and how open and willing those users are to change. Some companies choose to migrate the low-risk, easy, low-hanging fruit to get users accustomed to the cloud and the migration process, while other organizations jump in with both feet and tackle their biggest obstacles first. Pilot projects and proof-of-concepts may provide clarity on what to prioritize. There are so many variables, that sometimes it really helps to exchange ideas and experiences with an objective, third-party team. Contact us! We’d be happy to help.

How long does a typical cloud migration project take?

The migration time and effort widely vary in duration across various workloads. While some workloads (e.g., workloads already leveraging VMware) can lift and shift in a matter of hours or days, others (e.g., proprietary/legacy workloads) can be more complex and require more time and effort. The best place to start is with a discovery process designed to understand the workload from multiple perspectives, to identify any complexities and/or development needed to successfully migrate, and to build a specific migration plan for that workload. For a complex workload, these discovery engagements can take 1–2 weeks; with an additional 1–2 weeks, we can typically provide a proof of concept that proves out a use-case.

How can HGS Digital help us to embrace a DevOps model?

Through a limited engagement, we can model how a DevOps organization operates. Through our Cloud Experts on Demand, we can augment your team with resources who already understand the DevOps process. Our IT consultants can help you to establish an agile development process, adapt a continuous integration/continuous delivery/continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflow, automate software development and testing, and adopt cloud computing. For a deeper understanding of DevOps strategies, check out our DevOps and Cloud: A Dynamic Duo to Accelerate Your Business Performance whitepaper.

How does an organization that has adopted DevOps typically operate?

DevOps inspires collaboration among developers, operations team members, and quality assurance specialists to ensure continuous delivery, integration, and agile development. Responsibilities for planning, coding, building, testing, releasing, deploying, operating, and deciding when to repeat the cycle are shared.

What kind of benefits can we expect internally by embracing a DevOps approach?

The fundamental premise behind DevOps is that strengthening the cooperation among your IT team members ensures you are working in unison to support and enable end-users and customers. When your various IT teams aren’t devoted to the same causes, your users and customers suffer. Adopting DevOps can improve customer satisfaction (CSAT), but it can also improve employee satisfaction (ESAT). With that in mind, following are some of the internal benefits of DevOps:

Improved relationships and working culture
Improved IT service delivery
Rapid and reliable software delivery
Reduced development costs
Early detection and correction of issues
More knowledge sharing and continuous learning for all

Does HGS Digital provide data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) services?

Yes, with more than 500 IT professionals around the globe, HGS Digital is equipped to support your journey to cloud in this manner. We can help to migrate any workload, including applications, databases, files, images, and so on. We can provide this service with experts on demand, or as part of an overarching cloud project.

Transform your business with our end-to-end cloud services

Moving to cloud enables you to achieve faster time-to-market and free your resources to focus on other business goals. Cloud solutions reduce IT complexity, increase productivity, and provide the flexibility to scale up and down to meet the dynamic needs of your business.