South African organisations are rapidly moving to the cloud, but in some cases, they are keeping key legacy applications on-premise and taking a hybrid approach.
This emerged during a webinar on key issues around cloud migration, overcoming legacy infrastructure dependencies, security and compliance in the cloud.
It was noted that some local organisations still use mainframe or client/server architecture for their core business processes and functions, and have been slow to move legacy applications to the cloud because of concerns around compliance or migrating.
Greg DeaKyne, Helix Discovery product manager at BMC, said in the local market, most organisations were building new applications in the cloud, but fewer were migrating legacy applications. “Typically, a hybrid model is still being used,” he said.
Without discovery, the impact of cloud migrations on legacy applications and dependencies is unknown.
Alexander Lozhechkin, senior manager, Partner Solutions Architecture EMEA at AWS said: “One of the challenges in migration is proper planning – and this depends on discovery, which can be a tough task. This is an area where AWS and AWS partners can assist, and products like BMC Helix Discovery can help plan and execute the migration.”
Without discovery, the impact of cloud migrations on legacy applications and dependencies is unknown.
DeaKyne said: “Starting with a solid foundational understanding of what’s running in your environment, and all the relationships and dependencies, is so important when you are migrating to the cloud. Once you have migrated, you also need to understand the application as it dynamically changes over time.”
Simon King, EMEA sales director - Digital Service Management at BMC, noted that organisations had to evolve and overcome the concerns about migrating to cloud. “BMC understands the journey everyone is on as they move towards an automated, AI, cloud world, and we have the skills, tools and partners to make that happen,” he said.
Modernising ITSM
King also said that updating IT service management is important in supporting an organisation’s digital evolution.
“On the digital journey, the argument might be made that existing solutions are not designed to support new ways of working. So we need to modernise to avoid those solutions from slowing down cloud adoption and evolution,” he said. The BMC response to emerging ITSM challenges includes driving automation wherever possible, and enabling a data-driven business that translates to actionable insights, and linking the traditional environment and the new, agile environment, he said.
Daniel Bloy, EMEA practice lead at Voice Foundry, also outlined the Amazon Connect born in the cloud contact centre, which he said had seen significant uptake as organisations adapted to the lockdown. Amazon Connect significantly improves two key metrics in the contact centre - average speed to answer and call abandon rates - through differentiators such as self-service configuration, dynamic, personal and natural contact flows, an open platform and AWS services, he said. He elaborated on how Amazon Connect had been deployed to improve employee and service desk engagement and enable scaling at the News Corp service desk, which is the central point of contact for all IT-related questions within News Corp companies. The group immediately halved its time to answer and saw abandoned calls drop from 8.13% to 3.33% and achieved improved call reporting capability, service desk mobility and lower cost of ownership.
Advanced discovery
The speakers highlighted the cloud-native BMC Helix service and operations platform, BMC Helix ITSM and BMC Helix Discovery, for automatic discovery of data centre and multi-cloud inventory, configuration and relationship data and how that combination of tools is designed to help manage the shift from traditional on-premises solutions to majority cloud hosted solutions, whilst managing all aspects of the IT landscape during that transition.
BMC Helix Discovery, a cloud-native discovery and dependency mapping solution, is integrated with AWS Systems Manager to enable customers to identify and map all resources on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances on AWS.
Richard Montbeyre, Chief Privacy Officer at BMC also noted BMC’s advanced privacy and security compliance framework to support customers in achieving security and compliance.
Catching up to cloud webinar was presented by BMC and AWS, in partnership with ITWeb.
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