Whether you are migrating from on-premises to the cloud or across different cloud platforms, it can be a disruptive, stressful and drawn-out process.

Traditional migrations relying mostly on manual processes tend to be long, expensive and prone to errors. This means that automation, tooling and expertise are required to make this a seamless and cost-effective experience.

IBM Cloud VPC provides an improved experience to provision and manage cloud resources. It is built on a faster, more agile and secure infrastructure. Customers excited about adopting this new platform need a hassle-free approach and seamless experience to migrate their workloads and data in a fast, predictable and secure fashion.

Wanclouds’ SaaS-based platform, called VPC+, automates the entire process of migrating customers to IBM Cloud. This self-driven and automated approach — with the option of having expertly guided support from Wanclouds — allows IBM customers to migrate their resources to IBM Cloud VPC at a fraction of the typical migration time and cost.

This article dissects the entire process of a large-scale migration and how IBM avoids unnecessary complexities, resource allocation and add-on costs. It also looks at a couple of examples and challenges faced by customers while dealing with a migration from VPC on classic to the next generation IBM Cloud.

The following are some examples of the types of customers who could benefit from the migration process:

• Example 1: A financial customer running a big data application with a Hadoop cluster running analytics in every 24-hour cycle. The challenge is to migrate this entire cluster with terabytes worth of data and the associated infrastructure including networking, security policies, etc. within a 24-hour cycle. 
• Example 2: A retail customer with an online ecommerce store has multiple deployments, such as production, pre-production and testing environments. The deployments have to be migrated in a way to avoid downtime while providing the customer flexibility to migrate these resources in a phased approach.

The key challenges

Both of these enterprises experienced a number of important challenges and considerations that were common across other organizations undertaking this migration. A typical migration of a production application along with all of its network, compute, storage, Kubernetes resources and security policies, can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It also must take into account business continuity and downtime, which must be kept to a bare minimum.

Meanwhile, it was also vital that these organizations didn’t run into the compatibility issues that are often reported in migrations. For example, when Wanclouds helped IBM Cloud migrate its customers from IBM Cloud classic infrastructure to IBM Cloud VPC, it did so while ensuring that all of their environments would behave in the same way in the new VPC infrastructure. Addressing security challenges — notably ensuring security policies are intact across environments and moving network security (VPNs, etc.) functions in a seamless way — is also imperative in this increasingly risky landscape. So is the ability to take a holistic approach to data migration, accounting for essential infrastructure elements like networking functions, security rules and policies, associate endpoints and much more.

The solution: Multicloud Migrations-as-a-Service using VPC+

IBM Cloud partnered with Wanclouds to migrate its entire suite of customers in record time. Wanclouds’ reimagined approach is powered by its SaaS-based platform called VPC+. The product was coupled with enterprise-grade support to ensure a holistic and pragmatic approach that provides faster migrations while maintaining the best customer experience. VPC+ provides a centralized cross-cloud solution for Wanclouds’ Migration-as-a-Service (MaaS) to reduce financial investment and remove the technical complexities that halt or delay businesses’ migration plans.

The key automation and orchestration flow of VPC+ applied to achieve the results is as follows: Discover > Plan > Transform > Provision/Migrate > Validate

First, relationships were uncovered using VPC+ fully automated discovery function. Second, VPC+ used its data model to plan and dissect the different resource profiles, functions, configurations, and relationships. Third, VPC+’s translation and transformation algorithm created the constructs for the target cloud environment, such as firewall rules, IP subnetting and load balancing pool members. In the fourth phase, various orchestration flows were applied to prepare the resources and migrate them to the target environment. And finally, a fully automated step-by-step process was deployed to create the environment and restore, migrate the various resources discovered, translated, transformed and prepared in the previous steps. This step ensures creating a like-for-like source environment in hours with its complete network construct, resource creations and migrated data.

Along with VPC+, enterprise-grade support is applied to ensure the entire process results in the fastest and most efficient migration, with minimal downtime.

Key benefits and outcomes

Wanclouds’ reimagined approach focuses on outcomes while ensuring customer satisfaction. This approach to every customer’s migration journey makes for an incredibly cost-effective and efficient experience. In fact, once customers knew which resources they wanted to migrate, all it took was the click of a button, with VPC+’s automation handling the rest — something that helped cut down costs and migration time massively. Meanwhile, the ability to migrate with minimal downtime was vital for customers who needed to continue serving their users throughout the process. Wanclouds achieved this for IBM Cloud’s users by allowing them to ease into their all-new VPC offering and migrate at their own pace.

Post-migration, customers profited from compatibility checks by Wanclouds experts, which helped streamline any unforeseen issues caused by the migration. This on-demand expertise ensured that the migrated environment behaved just like the previous environment with the added benefits of IBM Cloud VPC. Customers could be confident of the security of migrating their data with VPC+ because it follows security best practices. Several independent third-party security firms also audited the VPC+ tool to ensure customers weren’t exposed to any risk.

Customer feedback

• “Hello Wanclouds Team, I hope you are well! With the migration to the [VPC] clusters for the customer successfully completed, I’d really like to take the chance to thank you and your team for a great job. In addition to your technical expertise, we appreciated the great cooperation and communication between our teams, it really helped a lot. Should we face similar projects in the future, Wanclouds will definitely be on top of our list.”
• “OK team, good work! That concludes migration of the three [classic VPCs] we have for our customers, thanks for all your help”
• “Wanclouds, thanks so much for assisting and getting it done so smoothly. Much appreciated.“
• “Hello Wanclouds Team, the customer informed me today that they consider the migration finished. I really appreciate all your help and availability. Congratulations to the entire team involved here.“

Get started

To learn more about migrating from IBM Cloud classic to IBM Cloud VPC by using VPC+, please visit the IBM Cloud documentation. You can also visit the Wanclouds website for more information about Wanclouds and its offerings.