The adoption of Cloud computing is skyrocketing. According to a Gartner press release, by 2020 a `no-cloud` policy will be as rare as a 'no internet' policy in companies. The reasons why so many organizations choose to migrate on-premise systems to the cloud can vary, but typical use cases include companies migrating from cloud to cloud or between regions within a cloud.

According to a recent Q&A session with Andy Jassy, the senior vice president of AWS, he credited AWS and its ease of use services with the recent trend in Shadow IT development.  The cloud services giant said “the covert adoption of its services by departments or small pockets of workers helped put the firm and its offerings on the radar of IT decision makers in the early days." With that being said, recent Shadow IT trends can put companies in danger when it comes to the control and development of mission critical as evidenced with a recent customer use case.

The Challenge: Shadow IT in the Cloud

One of our recent clients, a large Californian construction company, used the AWS cloud to quickly, easily and cost-effectively build a company-wide mobile safety program that solved an age-old problem in construction.

The employee of the construction company created the Safety Mobile Application in his own private AWS account. When the employee left the company the application was stranded posing significant risks and liabilities to the corporation. Our client needed an inexpensive quick fix solution to move their app to the corporate cloud and was seeking an automated migration solution to ensure application integrity.

The Problem

By definition, a shadow IT system is hardware or software within the enterprise that is often not sanctioned or supported by the company’s IT department. The term may also carry a negative connotation because it implies that the IT team has not necessarily approved a technology that employees are using. RiverMeadow’s Managed Migration Service offering helped this customer migrate this stranded mission-critical application, in a matter of days, not only from one region of AWS to another, but from account to account with no end-user disruption.

How Does RiverMeadow Managed Migration Solution Work?

Rivermeadow’s Managed Migration Solution is a combination of proprietary resources plus the company’s market-leading SaaS-based platform that simply delivers results for customers as a cost-effective and low-risk complete solution.   

RiverMeadow’s Managed Migration Service includes:

• Source Validation –  Validate source application workloads

• Pre-Flight Migration Check – Verifies applications and servers will migrate successfully and flags issues requiring attention ahead of time

• Move-Group Scheduling & Coordination – Aligns migration move group events to business and network requirements

• Migration Management

• Full Migration – Setup & execute initial full application workload migration from source to target cloud

• Differential Migration – Block or file-based synchronization depending on requirements for testing & cutover

• Delivery – Wrap up & handoff of completed migrated app move groups to customer teams for network cutover

• Real-Time Monitoring – Detailed and summary views of migration status and progress

• Reporting – Migration project status, type, time/date and audit trails

Looking to migrate workloads from region to region within a cloud?  Looking for a way to move stranded applications? Rivermeadow can help!  Click on the following link to request a demo of our capability.