"Experience Migrating to the Cloud" Presentation by Kevin Griffin of Harvard Business Publishing

I attended an interesting presentation by Ken Griffin chronicling his migration of IT operations at Harvard Business Publishing to the Cloud.   Here are his lessons learned:

1.       "Without a plan, there can be no victory."  Understand and categorize your applications: Easy to move - do it;  Hard to move not critical, legacy -  kill or replace. 

2.      Identity and Access management in cloud solutions adds to the security challenges - need identity layer.  Enterprise Access Management as a Service – Okta.  Rolling out to cloud was a bit to easy!  IaaS in AWS was best fit for Harvard Business Publishing.  Custom apps migration strategy and decommission sun setting apps.  Train IT operations staff and build net new.

3.      SysAdmin requirements in the cloud really are different from traditional.  Need scripting skills, Dev Opps people and don't really need SAN skills etc.

4.      People is the hurdle.  Get excited about it!  AWS Architect is a high value skill!

5.      Excitement only lasts so long – Technical details:

a.      Make use of AWS free services.

b.      Include compliance requirements early - limit scope

c.      Use VPC Automate security auditing

d.      Get your alerts to become notifications

e.      Plan your instances to evaporate

f.       Don't store sensitive data on the ephemeral drives

g.      Make use of all available zones

h.      Control costs with reserved and spot instances

i.       Tags, Tags, Tags, and decide on a naming convention early

 

6.      Reduce the hump - the longer you are in hybrid mode the more resources and money you need.

 
Invest only in new world!


Source:  Ken Griffin, Director IT Services and Operations, Harvard Business Publishing