5 Critical Ways CDW Ensures Success with Every Cloud Migration

Moving workloads to the cloud is not easy. There are many potential pitfalls to a cloud migration, including misconfigurations that can cause application downtime or introduce security vulnerabilities.

To do it right, enterprises need help from a trusted partner with varied cloud experience and deep expertise. CDW’s team of cloud and data center experts can help organizations design their cloud migrations and deploy them cost-effectively, securely and with no downtime.

For example, we recently helped an insurance company that was losing support for its on-premises data center migrate its entire environment to VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services in just three months.

That’s half the time such a migration normally takes under the best of circumstances. We used VMware’s HCX migration tool to help expedite the process. But our team’s experience leading effective cloud migrations was the most important factor in that company’s success.

Here are five critical tasks that CDW completes as part of every cloud migration, whether it’s to VMware Cloud on AWS or any other platform.

1. Environment optimization to reduce waste and extra resources. Before migrating apps to the cloud, the CDW team will right-size virtual machines to make sure they only use the CPU power, memory and storage they need. CDW will also size the cloud environment for the resources required, not necessarily what’s currently being used on-premises. Optimizing VMs for the cloud and streamlining the use of cloud resources will reduce costs. Otherwise, without optimization, customers could see a cloud bill that is double or triple what they expect.
   
   
2. Application dependency and migration planning to eliminate performance issues. This is a critical planning step to ensure that a company’s apps are migrated and work properly in the cloud. CDW’s experts map the applications and VMs that are dependent upon one another. They then group and move them together to prevent application performance issues.
   
   Throughout this planning process, the CDW team works with the company’s IT team to understand how apps and VMs communicate with one another. We also consult with the application owners to learn about performance requirements for users. During the app migration, we verify that apps are working properly together, then we work on the next wave of apps to migrate.
   
   
3. Network connection to ensure application portability and performance. CDW designs and configures a secure, scalable network connection that connects the on-premises data center environment to the cloud. This enables application migration and, if the goal is to build a hybrid cloud environment, application connectivity.
   
   
4. Building in security during and after the migration. CDW’s experts can design a security architecture that protects public cloud instances as well as east-west traffic between the on-premises data center and the cloud. CDW uses both native and third-party security tools in the cloud, such as virtual firewalls from leading providers including Palo Alto Networks.
   
   
5. CDW provides training for enterprise IT departments so they have the skills necessary to use and manage their new cloud environments. That includes training on how to use all associated tools.

If your business or organization wants to modernize its infrastructure by moving part or all data center operations to the cloud, a trusted partner such as CDW can help you design, architect and implement the project.