Cloud Migration

Is a cloud migration on your to do list? Our top stories from 2021 can help

January 25, 2022

Tom Nikl

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Cloud Migration

2022 is officially upon us, and while 2021 had its fair share of challenges, we continue to be impressed by the technology investments made by our customers and partners and their ongoing migration of legacy systems to the cloud. Before diving into 2022, we thought it would be fun to do a quick roundup of 2021’s ‘greatest migration hits’ first.

Fast and easy migration to Google Cloud

The most common theme we saw in 2021 was our customers migrating to Google Cloud faster and easier than they thought possible. Migrations are rarely a “one size fits all” project, but with the right solutions and people, it’s more than possible to be successful while moving fast. We’ll list some of the best migration stories and resources below.

To get you started, take a look at a bunch of great overview blogs including 3 Approaches To A Better Cloud Migration, 5 cheat sheets to help you get started on your Google Cloud journey, and 30 ways to leave your data center: key migration guides, in one place.

We also focused this year on best practices for using specific services to migrate what’s important to you. For data and storage, we released Best practices for migrating from on-prem to Google Cloud using Storage Transfer Service. While large-scale cloud migrations can be intimidating, there are a number of actions that you can take to ensure that even a multi-petabyte data transfer goes as smoothly as possible, using Google Cloud’s Storage Transfer Service.

Similarly, for databases, the Database Migration service went GA, which helps simplify the process of migrating MySQL and PostgreSQL databases from on-premises and other clouds to Cloud SQL. Freedom Financial Network quickly migrated their large MySQL databases to Cloud SQL and the actual downtime for each application from the database side was a maximum of ten minutes.

Datastream, a new Google Cloud service, gives you a way to Unlock the power of change data capture and replication with new, serverless Datastream, now GA. Datastream allows you to synchronize data across disparate databases, storage systems, and applications reliably and with minimal latency, to support real-time analytics, database replication, and event-driven architectures.

Saving time and money by migrating to Google Cloud

Getting to Google Cloud quickly and easily is one thing, but making sure you do that in a cost-effective manner is equally important. Properly budgeting for cloud costs and then staying within those budgets are crucial to cloud success, and we had some important stories to tell in 2021.

We commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic ImpactTM study on what kind of savings customers might be able to expect when migrating to Google Cloud. Through customer interviews and financial analysis, the study found that over three years a composite organization saved $13.1 million by migrating. There’s a ton more detail in the study itself, so be sure to download it today.

In addition to this study, a benchmark showed that the New Tau VMs deliver leading price-performance for scale-out workloads, a crucial avenue of savings for compute workloads, while Spot VMs give you an improved TCO with a maximum discount of 91% over on-demand VMs. And we also confirmed that you can Accelerate Google Cloud database migration assessments with EPAM’s migVisor to better understand and estimate your post-migration costs.

Once you’ve migrated to the cloud, having a smart, efficient way to manage it all is key to optimizing your costs. That’s why we were especially happy to Introduce VM Manager, which helps you simplify and automate the maintenance of large VM fleets, a key way to keep compute and administration costs down.

Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy (also known as happy customers)

Customers come to Google Cloud to solve complicated business challenges, and nothing makes us happier than exceeding their expectations and seeing them succeed.

In 2021, a few customer successes really stood out:

These are just seven notable customer stories that we remember from 2021, but there are plenty more at the Google Cloud customer success site. As you can see, customers had a laser focus on making migrations fast and easy, keeping them under budget, and delivering success to their users. If you’re exploring cloud migrations, check out our cloud migration guide and checklist. Or, if you’re eager to get going, let’s kick off a free IT discovery and assessment so you can start plotting your course to Google Cloud.

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