Ready to move to the cloud? It’s about time! According to a recent white paper published by Rackspace, moving to the cloud can save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. In this report, Rackspace compares the total cost of ownership (TCO) for self-managed on-premise to a managed hosted solution. The benefits highlighted in their white paper using a Rackspace dedicated hosting solution are astounding, saving around 37% TCO in a 3-year period compared to on-prem.

Okay, so you already know all of the advantages, and you are ready to move to the cloud, but now you are considering your migration strategy. Should you go the manual route or use an automated solution? Keep in mind not all migrations are created equal. There are simple migrations (stand-alone workload), extremely complex migrations (clusters) and there are all the scenarios in-between.    Regardless of how simple or complicated your migration will be, you should, at the very least, consider these four reasons for going with an automated solution.

1.  Migration Strategy resource costs

Think about all the preparation of your apps and VM’s needed prior to migration strategy and how much time and resource power that will require. With RiverMeadow SaaS, you migrate your workloads “as is” not only reducing resource cost but also dramatically reducing migration risk and human error.

2.  Migration Risk

As mentioned above, moving “as is” eliminates migration risk. Automated aws migrations using RiverMeadow SaaS rely on a bootable copy of the source server in the target cloud. Once the source server images and metadata are auto-collected, RiverMeadow SaaS converts the image onto the target cloud. The solution then deploys the converted image where it can be booted up as a fully compatible VM.

3.  Dedicated Hosting Solutions Upgrades

With RiverMeadow, all modifications are performed on clones in the cloud while the original source servers stay in production. The source machine is never affected when installing upgrades or patches. Read a recent white paper written by our CTO, Michael Kent, where he highlights the scenario of an upgrade from a Microsoft 2003 end-of-life server to a fully supportable Microsoft 2008 server using Rivermeadow’s migration extensions capability.

4.  Migration Readiness

Can you imagine starting your migration only to have it fail several hours into the migration process? RiverMeadow has a readiness and pre-flight check that verifies all applications and servers will migrate and flags issues ahead of time, so there is no need for a rollback. Check out this video that demonstrates an AWS migration at scale using RiverMeadow SaaS. Not only will you see how simple using our automated tool is, but you will also see how the pre-flight check works within our tool making sure you don’t run into issues during your migration.

Conclusion

Automation using RiverMeadow SaaS can be part of every type of migration. Our solution addresses the problem of cost, complexity and skill level constraints. It replaces the time-consuming, error-prone approach of manual server workload migrations offering capabilities for simple to very complex migrations.

RiverMeadow offers a full migration strategy and methodology as well as our SaaS automation solution. We can help you at any or every stage with our Global Migration Services to ensure you have a successful cloud migration .

I like to think of it this way; if you were driving across the country with very precious cargo but you needed new brakes, would you take your car to someone that has never replaced breaks before and doesn’t own the right tools? Or, would you take your car to an expert who has replaced thousands of breaks with an exceptional quality of service?

Schedule a demo and let us show you what we can do to get you into the cloud with our expertise and automation solution so you can migrate your precious data successfully.