Where was your cloud migration strategy when COVID hit?

The sudden shift to WFH has caused some experience woes

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a sudden shift in traffic patterns for enterprise applications, and companies who were progressed along their cloud migration paths have fared okay with the transition to WFH (work-from-home). But if you weren’t there yet, the shift of employees to WFH locations, traffic that used to originate from grouped network locations are now spread-out into individual homes, wrecking productivity and performance havoc in the mad dash.

For enterprise applications that were internally deployed, this has been a challenge on VPN solutions that were often not sized for such large volumes of users. For enterprise applications that were hosted in the cloud, this has had less of an impact, other than now having a decentralized client base.

Indeed, companies that were already well on their way in their cloud migration strategies have fared much better as a whole following the various confinement directives around the world. This has left the remaining companies scrambling to accelerate their cloud migrations.

Cloud migration progress determines post-COVID journey to work-from-home ease

As any cloud migration consultant will tell you, cloud migration failures are often the result of insufficient monitoring of end user experience. A clear picture of the user experience before and after the cloud migration is a crucial factor in the success of any such project.

The typical approach for monitoring such user experiences is to use application performance monitoring software (such as the Accedian Skylight solution) to compute key performance indicators that can be compared before and after migration happened. These KPIs empower IT managers to validate that the migration has not had any negative impact to key business processes. 

Likewise, if degradations are seen, such tools can quickly help identify where the slowdowns are occurring, allowing IT managers to be proactive in remediation efforts instead of reacting to end user complaints.

With users now working from home, and with many companies now proposing longer term teleworking initiatives, monitoring the end user experience of teleworkers has become much more important. Putting performance monitoring probes (old school, I know) at individual user locations in this context is much more challenging since the edge is no longer an IT-controlled data center, but an employee location. And that’s not to mention the cost.

Decentralized IT woes brought by experience and security challenges

This decentralization is a challenge for IT executives. It has implications for both security and monitoring purposes and exposes corporations to a much larger attack surface. Some customers are attacking this problem by deploying traffic probes to each end user location, but the expense of such probes is often prohibitive and also has scalability issues. 

A small footprint and low complexity solution is needed at the end user location.

A means to monitor network traffic and perform centralized analysis in a cost effective manner is now needed more than ever. The Accedian Skylight solution, with its unique Plug and Go architecture and flow broker built-in capture functionality, allows IT managers to deploy cost effective sensors at each end user location to selectively forward end user traffic to a centralized analytics solution for analysis. 

Using this approach, application traffic can be captured at the user level and be selectively forwarded for centralized end user experience KPI generation. 

This small footprint, distributed and scalable solution is exactly what IT managers need to ensure the success of their cloud migration projects.

For more information on how Skylight can help with your cloud migration, navigate here.