How do you plan to do such a big migration especially without disruption? What is the migration strategy?

Hi Nabil - great question - for sure it's a big migration but I think the key piece is to have it well planned out. We have many applications and servers to migrate - about 40% are already sitting in our DCs as VMs. Those are the easy ones. The other workloads will be done on a per DC basis and then some applications especially around SAP/ERP systems will take a different path.

We are just getting done with our first movers and from this experience we will decide what adjustments are needed to the overall strategy.

That's a good approach to do it in phases and evaluate at each stage.

Indeed - as you mentioned it's a large migration so for sure we will learn as we progress.

The migration in many respects is like any other, in that we have set up the foundations first with aspects such as connectivity and IAM. Once these basic pieces are in place, migrations have been able to slowly begin, which as Ravi pointed out, we will build upon.

So VMs will be mostly lift & shift ? Are you using this as an opportunity to replace existing Inhouse applications with SaaS or building new cloud native apps instead ?

That's correct. Mostly VMs will be lift and shift with some modernization along the way esp at the OS layer.

Good point David. These Foundations also help set ourselves up for future modernisation of the tougher applications that we will migrate that Ravi mentioned. Most will be lift and Shift to start with nut will also allow us to leverage for more new modern cloud native applications.

Of course, my message is simplified, and we could speak about this topic for a very long time. There are many aspects that need to be addressed, such as any out of service life platforms or platforms no conducive to a cloud move, licensing in the cloud, newer APIs versus legacy, and etc. We will focus on lifting and shifting as much as possible to enable a faster move, with less potential for outages. If there are easy changes to do with an application along the way, they can be considered.

Our strategy is cloud first - so as you mentioned this will be Cloud/SaSS , then decom as much legacy migrate the rest to the cloud.

Many large companies embrace multi-cloud strategy, do you see Google cloud is fit for all your needs ?

Our plan is that Google will take our IT workloads for the most part but there are a lot of other interesting PAAS offerings on the market that we will for sure engage with.