Many organizations are considering a move to the cloud. There are tons of articles highlighting the advantages that the cloud has to offer such as flexibility, cost savings, scalability, reliability, and security. For SMB’s, budgets can be tight, and the ability to spread costs by using a subscription model means more dollars for marketing efforts. 

Our partners tell us that companies who are adopting the cloud are seeing immediate gains. “We are seeing companies move quickly to the cloud and realizing immediate and substantial benefits,” says Bob Schaar, Practice Director, West – Cloud, Virtualization, Servers & Storage at Technology Integration Group (TIG) a trusted system integrator and RiverMeadow partner.

Bottom line, reducing TCO can be a make or break situation for some companies; so jumping on the cloud bandwagon is essential and making a fast move to the cloud a priority.

So why are some companies still deliberating over this move?   Well, there is more to it than it seems.

Roadblocks

Companies are finding the move to the cloud to be a daunting task. Big system integrators will tell you to analyze all your systems and come up with a migration strategy. This leaves some companies with an overwhelming amount of work and unexpected costs. Compatibility isn’t a problem with modern apps, but it can certainly become a major roadblock when there is a need to move legacy apps. This is when organizations are faced with the new task of reworking or rebuilding existing apps from scratch in order to make the move. However, this isn’t always possible. Resources aside, there are some things out of everyone's control. Perhaps the person who built the app is no longer with the company, or the company doesn’t even own the code removing the option of refactoring of their legacy apps. Maybe some apps were written with external dependencies that can make migration complicated or impossible.

A light at the end of the tunnel

There is actually a light at the end of the tunnel making migration a lot easier than some system integrators steer you to believe. There is this thing that you have probably heard about called "lift and shift", also known as direct migration. You probably know that it means exactly that, directly migrating by copying and moving with an “as-is” and “all-at-once” approach. This forklift strategy allows you to move the whole system rather than rebuild, refactor, recode. When you move houses, you don’t want to entirely replace everything inside. Moving to the cloud is the same.

RiverMeadow takes this a step further. A typical "lift and shift" approach provides very little customization and optimization. With RiverMeadow you get what we refer to as “Lift and Evolve.”   Using RiverMeadow’s automation SaaS solution, not only do you move all your apps “as-is” by making a clone of your environment in the target, but you also have the ability to modernize as you move via our Migration Extension capability which allows you to do things like add software, remove software and upgrade operating systems as part of the migration. Additionally, using RiverMeadow, you don’t have downtime, as RiverMeadow is an agentless “live” migration, so your original source server is still up and running. Now you can take your clone and go to town on everything you need to do to evolve and modernize, and you don’t cut over until you are ready.

“We have experienced the power of RiverMeadow's solution allowing companies to move to the cloud within weeks rather than months or even years providing immediate cost savings along with all the other cloud advantages, “ says Bob Schaar from TIG.

Don’t let big system integrators slow you down on your immediate cost savings. Let us provide you an in-depth demonstration and address your concerns to get you on the road to immediately improving your bottom line.

Request your free demo.