Many migration projects are still launched with the same intention: for urgent reasons, the systems must be moved quickly to a new environment (specifically, the cloud), with the actual modernisation to follow afterwards.
On the one hand, this is understandable given the day-to-day realities of IT; on the other hand, however, it carries the very real risk of projects being put on hold after the move – until the actual modernisation is forgotten. This phenomenon cannot be explained solely by a lack of diligence on the part of individual project stakeholders or flawed structures. It stems from a mechanism that repeats itself regardless of sector or company size: the actual reason for the migration disappears once the move to the cloud is complete. The task that was originally behind it remains unresolved.
Where an acute problem needs to be resolved – for example, expiring support, a security vulnerability or an auditor who is no longer turning a blind eye – the driving force is rarely architectural conviction, but quite simply necessity. Once the systems are running in the cloud, the pressure naturally eases. Operation successful. The server is no longer considered obsolete; the warning is no longer valid. In reality, however, little has changed. The same code, the same dependencies, the same technical debt – just in a different place.
In practice, once the operational pressure is off, anyone who still feels responsible often disappears too. The migration project had a team, a budget, a deadline. The modernisation that follows has none of these. It may have been the justification for the project, but not its substance. Once the migration is complete, the team is gone too, spread out to tackle the next urgent issue.
The result is probably familiar to anyone who has worked in IT long enough: a system that looks future-proof on paper but is, in reality, just as laborious to maintain as before. But now with a cloud provider who stands to gain from every change. Yet hardly anyone would dream of taking out an insurance policy and then never reviewing it again, simply because it was correct at the time of taking it out. With systems in the cloud, however, this is precisely the scenario that plays out on a massive scale: the completion of the migration is mistaken for the end of the project.
The difference is this: with insurance, the annual premium invoice automatically provides a reason to take another look. With a cloud migration, this reason does not arise of its own accord; it must be planned for. In concrete terms, this means a modernisation milestone that is included in the same project brief as the migration itself, with its own budget and its own person in charge – someone who does not disappear along with the migration team. Without these steps, ‘lift and shift’ remains what it was never intended to be: not the first step in a transformation, but its premature end.
This press release is also available at www.pr-com.de/de/avision.
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