Migrating to the Cloud Isn't As Easy As Most People Think: A Conversation With Mark Porter and Accenture’s Michael Ljung

Moving away from a legacy relational database and developing a strategy around your cloud journey can unlock value that is otherwise limited without a streamlined, simplified, and modernized cloud architecture.

But that outcome is by no means guaranteed. Although the journey to the cloud is often painted as an easy path to simplicity, agility, and scalability, the quickest way to migrate, the lift-and-shift approach, can encourage organizations to arrive to the public cloud and begin deploying new software and resources without considering the complexity they can create — and without having solved for architectural considerations prior to migration.

Think about packing for a big move. It’s a best practice to purge unnecessary items, clean, and organize, so you arrive at your new home with a better understanding of what you need, what you own, and how useful those items will be in your new place. Likewise, considerations around applications and database architectures are best addressed prior to migration. Without a proper migration strategy in place, businesses arrive in the cloud with the same complex architecture, an excessive amount of siloed data, and the weight of unnecessary applications. It’s the same organization with the same operations, only located in a new landscape. If your business is currently frustrated by the course corrections needed after a migration, partners like Accenture and MongoDB can help organize your cloud environment and your database architecture.

MongoDB CTO Mark Porter recently sat down with Michael Ljung, Accenture’s global engineering lead, to discuss the benefits of cloud migration — and to get real about the challenges.

According to Ljung, there are real and immediate benefits to migrating. For example, a study by Accenture found that customers were seeing a 10% cost savings stemming from migrating applications in a lift-and-shift fashion. But that number is small compared to the potential benefits of the cloud. Ljung says that it’s also important to replace the mindset of simple migration as the ultimate goal and to focus more on modernization, co-creating, innovating, and differentiating.

This means thinking of the cloud in a new way. Migration is the start of a journey, not the final destination. It means refactoring, repurposing, replacing, or retiring applications altogether when necessary. This mentality also applies to database architectures in the cloud; many companies believe they can move their relational database to the cloud and database operations will automatically improve in terms of productivity. This is not realistic, and not the mindset for driving the best database strategy.

Accenture helps client organizations assess their current cloud state and implement their MAGI methodology—that is, to modernize, accelerate, grow, and innovate.