NOTE: This is part 3 of 4. If you missed either, please click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2 access.
“Why didn’t I do this sooner?”
It is generally agreed that workloads are what determine the resourcing options. Anytime we typically hear about the “repatriation of workloads” from the cloud back to on-premise deployments, it is typically a consequence of not properly rationalizing the best migration option for said workload. And as expected, the workloads that migrate first and remained in the cloud were those around re-factoring/re-engineering of applications, or re-purchasing through SaaS delivery options.
As for IaaS, it is arguable that running these workloads on-premise can be done in a more cost-effective manner, which made it harder to convince clients to migrate via lift and shift. Other confounding factors in the form of technology debt and traditional IT Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt made it even more difficult to convince clients that IaaS has a valuable role in their cloud transformation.
But COVID changed everything.
In a rush to implement new remote workforce technologies, organizations prioritized functionality over security. Only when we started receiving more requests for Incident Response due to resulting security breaches did we see a willingness to move to IaaS – all with less planning and addressing FUD than when it was originally proposed.
Why? Because hardware was not available.
This lack of availability in hardware resources required organizations to deploy in cloud as quickly as possible. VMware Cloud and AWS became the first option – no detailed “right-sizing” was required to determine VM placement as the hypervisor was the same AND still deployed on dedicated hosts (no shared tenancy).
And as the recovery efforts happened in weeks rather than months, the most common post-recovery question was, “Why didn’t I do this sooner?”
And as we looked at other IaaS deployments, we completed over the course of the pandemic, the phenomena of “move to improve” jump-started modernization of technology debt that accumulated as a result of virtual environment sprawl, majority VMware, that grew too large and weren’t properly maintained (multiple versions, non-consistent patching/updating, lack of standardization in VMhost deployment, etc).
While in the case of breach recovery, there was no option except migrating to IaaS, other use cases like datacenter expansion/consolidation, VDI burst capability, and DR still chose IaaS overbuilding on-prem.
In the final part of this blog, we will discuss how organizations used the “move to improve” rationalization approach to jumpstart modernization of Mode 1 workloads and accelerate the development/modernization of Mode 2 workloads. Stay Tuned!
If you would like to learn or discuss any of the topics covered in this post in more detail, please reach out.I can also be found on LinkedIn or Twitter.
