Financial strain, frustrations, and even repatriations can make companies wonder if modernizing information technology is worth it. Available stats spell out the benefits of cloud in pretty compelling numbers. But those outcomes must be achieved by plotting an optimal path to cloud and carefully avoiding wasteful wrong turns. 

Companies don’t pack up and move to cloud just because it sounds cool.

“It’s not an abstract sort of exercise or an abstract discipline — it happens for a reason,” said Mikhail Prudnikov (pictured, right), principal, business development, at Amazon Web Services Inc. “If you look at the innovative companies, at fast-moving companies, effectively, they see [an] average time-to-value metric about 440 times faster than … what we call slow companies.” 

But many are hitting stumbling blocks in pursuit of improvements such as these.

Prudnikov and Julie Baldwin (left), senior director of global CSP alliance sales at SUSE, spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the SUSECON Digital event. They discussed SUSE’s partnership with AWS and shifting attitudes toward and approaches to cloud migration. (* Disclosure below.)

45 minutes to rebirth in cloud

Companies aren’t jumping into the task of cloud migration as readily as they once did, according to Baldwin.

“I think there was some research done last year with 451 [Research LLC] [showing that] the previous year a lot of customers said, ‘Yeah, we’re moving to cloud and it’s easy.’ And then this year, when they re-ran the survey, it was, ‘No, it’s really hard. We need partners. We need to look at how we do this,'” Baldwin said. 

Some of their trouble likely stems from attempting to move apps to cloud without properly sizing them up first. For some apps, a lift and shift is feasible, while others need to be refactored or rewritten first, Baldwin explained. Also, it’s important to choose the simplest migration path possible since some can be time-consuming and costly.

AWS and SUSE have partnered on Quick Start, which automatically deploys SUSE Cloud Application Platform (a fully containerized implementation of Cloud Foundry) on the AWS Cloud. Quick Start setup takes about 45 minutes and gives customers a means to move both traditional and cloud-native apps to the cloud.

“With SUSE CAP, you already have enabled people, and they can practice DevOps, they can practice Agile, and essentially align this with fast time-to-value practices,” said Prudnikov, adding that Quick Start accelerates the process.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the SUSECON Digital event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SUSECON Digital. Neither SUSE, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE