These unprecedented times have been an unexpected catalyst driving companies to finally get serious about moving to the cloud. The adoption wave started in retail and banking by consumers who were unable to shop and bank in-person and were forced instead to drastically increase their online purchases.
As a result, many e-commerce sites hosted on public clouds experienced a Cambrian explosion of activity and business. The impact of the pandemic soon crossed every industry and segment from healthcare and education to hospitality and food services, as more and more companies closed their offices in favor of remote work. With closed buildings came closed data centers and other short-staffing of business-critical services.
Coupled with supply chain disruptions of compute, networking, and storage gear, many IT teams were faced with mounting business continuity challenges, which impacted service level agreements, product quality, and ultimately customer satisfaction.
The answer to these challenges is to move applications, data, and infrastructure from on-premises to the cloud, with hosting provided by large public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud – both of which are better suited to support business-critical services.
As businesses continue to define their new processes and procedures, one condition is likely to become permanent: Cloud adoption is expected to accelerate and spread across all industries. IDC FutureScape predicts that by 2024 more than 50% of all IT spending will go toward digital transformation and cloud-first innovation projects.
Despite this immutable momentum, many CIOs remain reticent as 80% are still concerned that cloud adoption initiatives alone won’t deliver the expected business agility they need, according to a McKinsey report.
One reason for this is that migrating and modernizing applications simultaneously to the cloud takes more effort and experience than organizations can afford. To be successful, organizations need to adopt new software development strategies and DevOps tools to support hybrid and multi-cloud models. These teams often lack the consistent methodology and toolchains to plan, prioritize, automate, and track the progress of cloud migration projects. Adding to the risks, many companies are hampered with legacy software development workflows, disconnected processes, and siloed tools. They are further burdened with a complicated inventory of mismatched legacy hardware, aging networks, security, and application stacks that are poorly suited to cloud-native architectures.
Ultimately, successful cloud migrations require mastering the basics by adopting proven, repeatable, and reliable processes such as breaking big initiatives into manageable workstreams. Consistency and structured repeatability have a greater impact on project success than executive sponsorship, funding, or upgrading the company culture to an “agile” mindset. GitLab plays a critical role in the successful deployment and delivery of these cloud migration projects.
DevOps: The first logical step in cloud adoption
GitLab is a modern DevOps platform used by startups as well as midsize and Fortune 500 companies to build and deliver software through an integrated toolset. In simple terms, it’s Git for source code management with a built-in CI/CD pipeline that includes security, code scanning, and monitoring. GitLab is an all-in-one integrated platform. No need to digitally piece multiple solutions together and no more switching between different tools and apps just to deploy software code.
As enterprises plan to migrate apps, services, data, and/or infrastructure to the cloud this year, these projects will benefit from new ways to plan, manage, and deliver value from their cloud investments.
To get started, GitLab, together with AWS and Google Cloud, has chronicled this journey with valuable guidance to help cloud teams embrace the cultural shift necessary for modern agile teams. In these guides, we map out an approach that empowers cross-functional teams to work together concurrently during migrations, refactorization, and adoption of new cloud services.
With GitLab, users can define custom assessment methodologies, create repeatable task lists for application migration, store app code and Terraform configuration scripts in Git, and set security protocols easily through simple merge requests. GitLab can also automate the process of testing, scanning, monitoring, and deploying business apps. By embracing next-gen DevOps, cloud migration projects can be more successful with proven, repeatable, and reliable processes all managed on the GitLab DevOps platform.
