The financial services industry has a long history of leveraging virtual machines (VMs), and like many other industries lately, companies are reevaluating their virtualization strategies and under pressure to transition to a cloud-based infrastructure to meet the demands of today’s rapidly changing market.
Financial services organizations are now looking to streamline their virtual machine (VM) migration plan to achieve cost savings, enhanced DevOps capabilities, and scalability. However, this transition cannot happen overnight and having a comprehensive plan in place for your organization’s VM migration is non-negotiable.
Keys to Successful VM Migration
Based on recent conversations with financial services organizations that my team has worked with, there are many factors that can make the VM migration process more difficult than it needs to be. Fortunately, there are some key considerations that businesses can keep in mind when they are planning to shift their virtualization strategy that will help.
When planning for a successful migration, the first order of business should be to conduct a holistic assessment before making any decisions. This should include an evaluation of existing VMs, identify dependencies, performance requirements, and critical workloads. A thorough assessment of the current state of your environment will help you analyze your VM infrastructure, identify VM workloads, define integrations, and understand Day 2 operations, including automation, configuration management, monitoring and backups. It is important to factor in the maturity of the VMs, as not all VMs should be migrated. Collaborating with the application teams may identify VMs that can be decommissioned.
Once there is a clear and strategic roadmap for migration following the assessment, it’s important to track progress throughout the VM migration process. Starting with a select group of VMs to validate processes and establishing a reliable reporting model to follow will help to maintain synchronization and streamline future migration efforts.
Another crucial part of facilitating a smooth migration is to prioritize open communication. This may seem like an obvious piece of the puzzle, but teams that typically work in silos may need to explore new patterns and channels of communication to make sure essential information is being shared. Effective communication across teams will minimize redundant efforts and ensure that only the necessary VMs are migrated.
Pitfalls to Avoid
Migrations aren’t always seamless and like any technology transition, there will be challenges that teams have to overcome. However, there are pitfalls that can be evaded to prevent these hurdles from becoming big problems. One of the most common issues that businesses face when migrating their VMs is a lack of stakeholder alignment. If all relevant stakeholders, including IT teams, business units, vendors and management, aren’t aligned on the migration strategy and objectives, there is a strong likelihood that delays, and confusion will occur.
With financial services being such a heavily regulated industry, data integrity and security risks should always be top of mind for any new technology initiative. While beginning with common and simpler VMs is a good starting point, VMs with sensitive financial data require additional security measures. Application teams should document procedures and controls throughout the migration journey to verify compliance.
Lastly, businesses need to properly account for resource sizing and scalability when planning their migration. Inaccurately sizing resources like CPU, memory and storage for VMs, can lead to limited scalability, which could hinder future growth.
Whether a business is migrating hundreds of VMs or hundreds of thousands of VMs, these key considerations can help you develop a successful migration plan. Be sure to do your research to find the right vendor that will address your infrastructure’s current needs, reduce operating costs and increase IT efficiency.
The author, Jeff Picozzi, is Product Marketing Manager, Industries and Edge at Red Hat.