What are the benefits of moving IBM WebSphere workloads to Google Cloud?
As the digital landscape transforms at an unprecedented pace, companies are actively exploring innovative strategies to boost operational efficiency, minimise expenses, and increase their capacity for growth. One significant move that many organisations are considering is migrating their IBM WebSphere workloads—including IBM MQ, IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE), and WebSphere Application Server (WAS)—to the Google Cloud.
In this article, we explore the benefits of such a migration, focusing on both lift-and-shift approaches using VMware/virtualisation technology and the additional advantages of moving to containers on Google Cloud.
Lift-and-Shift to Google Cloud
What is Lift-and-Shift?
Lift-and-shift is a straightforward migration strategy where existing applications are moved from on-premises environments to the cloud with minimal changes. This approach is often implemented using virtual machines (VMs) on platforms like VMware and other hypervisors.
Benefits of Lift-and-Shift
- Minimal Disruption: Lift-and-shift allows businesses to migrate their workloads to the cloud without significant modifications to their existing applications. This minimises downtime and disruption to business operations.
- Cost Savings: By moving to the cloud, organisations can reduce the costs associated with maintaining on-premises hardware and infrastructure. Google Cloud offers a pay-as-you-go model, which can lead to significant cost savings and once workloads are better understood you can move to committed usage models for parts of your cloud infrastructure which provides even higher levels of discount for a fixed term commitment.
- Scalability: Google Cloud provides scalable resources, allowing businesses to easily adjust their compute and storage needs based on demand. This flexibility is particularly beneficial for handling peak loads and seasonal variations.
- Enhanced Security: Google Cloud offers robust security features, including encryption, identity and access management, and compliance with industry standards. This ensures that sensitive data is protected and regulatory requirements are met.
Moving to Containers on Google Cloud
What are Containers?
Containers are lightweight, portable units that package an application and its dependencies, allowing it to run consistently across different environments. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a powerful platform for running and managing Kubernetes containerised applications.
Benefits of Containerisation
- Increased Resource Efficiency: Containers are more efficient than VMs because they share the host operating system, reducing overhead. This leads to higher density and better utilisation of resources. They also allow an application to be broken down into more modular components with compute resources being allocated more specifically rather than allocated as a whole to the monolith. Examples being: price, promotion or inventory containers where demands during peaks can be higher than other parts of an application.
- Faster Deployment and Scaling: Containers can be deployed and scaled quickly, enabling rapid response to changing business needs. GKE automates many aspects of deployment, scaling, and management, reducing the operational burden.
- Improved DevOps Practices: Containers facilitate continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, allowing for more frequent and reliable software updates. This accelerates the development cycle and improves software quality. It also means that you don’t have to retest parts of the application that haven’t changed.
- Enhanced Portability: Containers can run consistently across different environments, making it easier to move applications between on-premises data centres and the cloud, or even between different cloud providers.
- Modernisation Opportunities: Moving to containers enables businesses to modernise their applications by integrating with cloud-native services such as Istio for service mesh, Cloud Logging, and Cloud Monitoring. This enhances the functionality and performance of existing applications.
The Migration Process – Here’s how we can help
So, you’ve made the decision to migrate an installation to Google Cloud. Let’s look at how DeeperThanBlue will enable a smooth transition.
Assess
- Inventory Applications: We will catalogue all your applications and their dependencies.
- Evaluate Suitability: This will allow us to determine which applications are suitable for migration based on their architecture and dependencies.
Plan
- Infrastructure Setup: We will identify, design and enable the necessary cloud resources through infrastructure as code scripting and set up network access.
- Training: We can offer training to your teams on Google Cloud and containerisation best practices.
Deploy
- Lift-and-Shift: Option one is to migrate your applications to VMs on Google Cloud using various tools.
- Containerisation: Option two (an extension to option one) is for us to consider the use of containers, construct a DevOps pipeline that builds the infrastructure along with the WebSphere software and custom application into containers that are then deployed on to GKE.
Optimise
- Resource Management: We would then fine-tune the resource allocations so that you can take advantage of auto-scaling features and ensure that you are getting best value from your cloud investment.
- Integration: Finally, we would enable integration with cloud-native services to enhance application functionality and performance.
Return on Investment
Let’s face it, most IT investments aren’t cheap. However, there is a payoff. In this case you’re looking at reducing mid- to long-term costs, improving performance and reliability, and enhancing the security of your systems. For example, in research by IDC commissioned by Google, it was found that organisations that migrated to Google Cloud could generally expect a 318% five-year ROI.
Cost Savings
- Lower Infrastructure Costs: By moving to Google Cloud, you eliminate the costs associated with maintaining on-premises hardware, and the pay-as-you-go model ensures that you only pay for the resources you use. When needing more compute power you don’t need to go through lengthy capital expenditure approval cycles, ordering and waiting for the supply chain to deliver the new server, wasting weeks of progress. Where non-production environments are concerned these can be scaled down or turned off overnight, weekends, and when not in use, saving you money.
- Operational Efficiency: Automation and managed services in Google Cloud reduce the operational burden on IT teams, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives. Get them working smarter, not harder. In the IDC research, it was found that organisations reduced their cost of operations by 51% over 5 years after migrating to Google Cloud. This frees up budget and allows you to focus on innovating for the business with new applications rather than focussing on keeping the lights on.
Increased Revenue
- New Revenue Opportunities: In the Google-sponsored IDC research, it was reported that organisations gained an additional $3.23m in revenue after moving to Google Cloud.
Performance Improvement
- Scalability: Google Cloud’s scalable infrastructure ensures that applications can handle increased loads without performance degradation.
- Modernisation: Containerisation enables the use of modern development practices and tools, leading to faster and more reliable software delivery, as well as a future-proofed system.
- Operational efficiencies: More findings from the IDC survey revealed that organisations reported 57% more efficient IT infrastructure management teams, and that the deployment of new application features was 75% faster after migration.
Security and Compliance
- Enhanced Security: Google Cloud’s robust security features protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with industry standards.
- Disaster Recovery: Cloud-based disaster recovery solutions provide greater resilience and faster recovery times (RTO) in the event of an outage. This is more dependable than an on-premises deployment. Establishing environments in different regions is far easier on the cloud than on-premise in practice. Again, these can be scaled down when not in use, which is far more difficult to achieve on-premise, especially when you have had to outlay capital.
Conclusion
Migrating IBM WebSphere workloads to Google Cloud offers numerous benefits, from cost savings and scalability to enhanced security and modernisation opportunities. Whether you choose a lift-and-shift approach using VMware/ Hypervisor or opt for containerisation on Google Cloud, the move can significantly improve your organisation’s agility, efficiency, and overall performance. By carefully planning and executing the migration, businesses can achieve a substantial return on investment and position themselves for future growth and innovation.
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If you would like to know more and discuss your next steps further please feel free to get in touch and we will set up a meeting with one of our WebSphere Google Cloud experts.
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