Editorial

Intelligent migration is key to any successful cloud strategy

Why ‘lift and shift’ simply isn’t enough when it comes to cloud migrations, says Automated Intelligence

Posted 13 May 2021 by Christine Horton


Data needs to be at the heart of any cloud strategy in the public sector. It isn’t enough to simply ‘lift and shift’ all of your information to the cloud without any consideration of the data beforehand. To be successful, organisations must undergo a process of analysing, organising, categorising and mapping out where that information will reside before any cloud migration takes place.

“There’s a rush to get to the cloud and use those technologies,” says Paul Hudson, head of product strategy, Automated Intelligence. “But if you just take data as it is currently structured, and drop that into this new environment, it’s not going to work. You will have all the same pains that you had before, plus new ones!”

These include governance issues associated with people now being able to search and retrieve data in the cloud without proper access permissions. It could also mean people working on different versions of documents, resulting in multiple versions of the truth.

In short, without having control of the data, these are issues that can quickly spiral and organisations won’t get the expected value out of the new cloud platform, says Hudson.

“The way to tackle this is to understand your data and its quality. How much activity is duplicated? How much of it is very old and has no value to the business? We talk about ROT: redundant, obsolete or trivial information. It’s data the organisation doesn’t need. And yet, it’s still there, because they don’t know it’s there. Cleansing all this removes the unnecessary clutter so users can do their jobs more effectively, but also it frees up storage space and the associated costs that comes with it.”

Intelligent Migration

This process of understanding and taking control of data is what Automated Intelligence describes as “intelligent migration”.

“Migration is about planning, looking at what you’ve got, and comprehending the nature and the scale of the problem, in particular any hidden risks. Organisations may have personally identifiable information (PII) and not even realise it. This is where you track and cross-reference with the record of processing activities required for GDPR compliance, which should indicate where and why you store this personally identifiable information, and how long it should be retained for.”

Automated Intelligence say that an intelligent migration lets organisations:

  • Identify over-retained data
  • Identify data not under governance
  • Identify personal data
  • Remove zero value content
  • Automatically apply data retention and disposition policies
  • And automatically classify data against Information Governance strategies

All this means that organisations have an efficient, secure, governed, structured and easy to manage data set once in the cloud.

Taking users on the journey

Hudson says organisations should go through a process of iterative design around the new platform.

“When you look at the team you should ask, what information do you have access to? This is a critical thing – people in business may not be able to access relevant data because they don’t know where it is, or if they’ve got the permissions.

Being able to see all the data that different teams can access, based on security, provides a clear view and helps you fix any problems users may have much quicker.

“Having this strategy where users understand and can leverage data is one of the biggest returns on investment for any organisation,” says Hudson.

Once the data is understood, Automated Intelligence helps public sector customers build out their vision with their design teams, go through user acceptance testing, ensuring the new environment is fit for purpose.  Then everything is in place to deliver the cloud migration at the end.

Hudson’s advice is to “get the insights, understand what your platform needs to look like in the new world, organise your data and user requirements, and then reap the benefit of the new cloud world.”

Discover more about the steps to a successful cloud migration with Automated Intelligence.

This article is classified as commercial content.