Managing a Cloud Migration with CenturyLink

Migration to the cloud doesn't have to be complicated. At CenturyLink® , we understand the importance of easing the complexity involved with migrating platforms. Read up on simplifying your cloud migration and get in-touch with one of our cloud specialists allows customers learn more about migration to receive information and details on migrating to the CenturyLink Platform with free onboarding support.

The following guide is here to help tick the boxes on the important steps and criteria for a successful migration to the cloud.

Assess your existing situation

It's important to take stock of existing infrastructure, licensing, staffing, and hardware capabilities and limitations. When it comes to migration, this step goes beyond assessing the state of the physical equipment – it means getting a holistic perspective of your existing situation and needs in their entirety.

• Where are you regarding end-of-life status on existing hardware, leases, warranty, or support agreements? Taking snapshots of each of these elements is crucial to taking the next (and necessary steps) towards a migration.

• Is it time to renew software enterprise agreements? Can you take advantage of more flexible subscription or service provider licensing models? Oftentimes, it makes more business and operational sense to take

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Migration from a dedicated legacy platform to the cloud is a multi-step process that highlights all the applicable, real-life considerations in real-time. Specifically, ensuring that the customer’s availability requirements are met throughout the process and any configuration changes that are necessary to ensure the workload is optimized for the new platform are made. Although migration itself can be a complex exercise, it does not have to be overly-complicated, and it's not something customers have to feel they're all alone in doing. In reference to Forrester's Cloud App Migration Cost Model brief, questions like, “We’ve got a cloud-first strategy; now, how much will it cost to move our core applications to a public cloud?” lead to more inquiries about how a migration will impact the things that affect business the most — enterprise applications.

Defining Enterprise Apps

Enterprise applications are developed and deployed with the following elements in mind: complexity, scalability, distribution viability, component-based architecture versus service-oriented architecture (SOA), mission-critical functionality, and deployment capability on a variety of platforms across corporate networks, intranets, and the Internet. Enterprise applications are data-centric while remaining user-friendly and oftentimes, have to fall into compliance with stringent security, administration, and maintenance requirements.

A major component of the cloud migration...

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There are many variables to consider when migrating from one platform to another. The whole process can be daunting; factors that directly affect business like associated costs, current and future states of software and data stores, and the decommissioning of physical properties, are a few of the considerations related to migration. Luckily for customers, CenturyLink makes cloud migration easier than ever.

Migration Made Easy

Depending on your business-specific needs, either as a new customer looking to migrate to a new cloud provider or as an existing customer who needs to migrate from a legacy platform (VPDC, OCC, CDC, or DCC), migration doesn't have to be overly-stressful. At CenturyLink, we have a team of experts that make migration smooth and less complicated. We encourage our customers to explore the CenturyLink Platform and familiarize yourself with the interface and, of course, let CenturyLink show you how to make cloud migration easy.

Don't Go it Alone

By getting in-touch with a cloud specialist, customers can find migration documentation with information and receive details on migrating to the CenturyLink Platform with free onboarding support. Our team of experts understand the need for companies to diversify their offerings across product and service lines while maintaining and providing customer support....

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Periodically, we turn over control of the CenturyLink Cloud® blog to members of our certified technology Ecosystem to share how they leverage our platform to enable customer success. This week’s guest author from the Cloud Marketplace Provider Program is Gautam Thockchom for Sureline Systems.

Sureline is leading the way with a complete, easy-to-deploy application mobility solution that is flexible, provides the highest quality recovery points and replicates them remotely for safety, delivers zero data loss failover and failback, and provides the ability to test disaster recovery (DR) plans easily and frequently without locking the customer to a specific cloud. We're an industry leader in cloud migration, DR software, and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions. Sureline fundamentally solves the problem of any-to-any DR and migration, enabling seamless data migration and DR from any environment -- physical or virtual -- to CenturyLink Cloud.

In our experience moving customers to the cloud and protecting thousands of machines on the cloud, we've noticed that customers are quite serious about beginning the conversion process. However, a lot of cloud projects are slow to start because of a simple reason -- the question of how to move to the cloud is typically not answered clearly.

In order...

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Get In and Get Going

​ Whether you're a customer migrating to a new Cloud provider or you're an existing customer migrating from a legacy platform like VPDC, OCC, CDC, or DCC, migrating is seamless and simple with the experts at CenturyLink. It's important to get in, explore, and find the differences in meta models, map services from your old provider and the Legacy Platform, and try things out to get familiar with the new interface. ​ CenturyLink's Cloud Migration program entry requirements make the process easy-to-follow, as customers must: ​

• Meet pre-qualification requirements and complete The Cloud Provider Velocity Program document that details the terms and credit allocation. You can obtain the document by emailing a Cloud Specialist.
• Provide proof of active use from a competing Public Cloud, especially in light of some providers shutting down their Public Cloud offerings. If that situation applies to you, check out this trial offer.
• Establish a contracting process for CenturyLink Cloud prior to engagement.
• Pass through the pre-qualification process by March 30, 2016 for free migration on-boarding offer eligibility. ​ By migrating to CenturyLink Cloud® from another cloud provider with the help of CenturyLink's Migration and On-boarding teams, customers will benefit from CenturyLink's matching Cloud Credit offer. The offer includes on-boarding services and

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Improving your business requires changing your business. When dealing with Migration, changes need to be researched per business case and methodically implemented. Stakeholders and leadership are always looking for opportunities rooted in IT and product improvements. Whether these improvements are driven by cost savings or the need for increased capacity, disaster recovery, proximity to customers, or IT/product agility, a diversified data center solution could provide the advantages you are looking for. Over half the market of Enterprise IT decision makers are in the same boat and are researching change that will include a hybrid IT solution by 2017.

To help outline the benefits you might achieve through migration, this article introduces:

• Four basic hosting options
• Hosting option characteristics
• Hosting option selection goals:
  • Converting capital to operating expenses
  • Offloading staff responsibilities
  • Specific operational goals

Data Center Options

The market has responded to customer needs by providing several layers of data center options, offering increased offloading of facility and infrastructure management. Although individual providers have different mixes of features to offer and different ideas about what services to offer at each level, we can divide the space into four general categories.

On-Premises

Company-owned data centers run the gamut of sophistication from a gear closet to a stand-alone data center with dedicated facilities management....

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Are those Windows 2003 servers you still haven't updated slowly becoming a headache? The servers reached their official end-of-life (EOL) date several weeks ago, yet millions of platforms are still running on this operating system (OS). For many companies that manage their own infrastructure, upgrading servers may seem like an overwhelming task, not to mention the price tag and time commitments that can come along with it. But there are also many excellent reasons to explore your options —whether it be a traditional upgrade and maintenance of your on-premises servers or making the switch to a cloud-based environment.

4 Reasons to Consider an Upgrade

Although Windows Server 2003 will not stop working as soon as support expires, there are a number of reasons to consider upgrading to a new system.

Reason #1: No More Support

There will be no more updates to fix bugs and security vulnerabilities. In the past five years there have been between 85 and 110 security updates on the Windows 2003 OS annually. Lack of support will leave your system vulnerable to malicious attacks and electronic data loss. While your company's support staff may be able to discover some vulnerabilities, not receiving frequent upgrades to supported servers will seriously...

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Checklists—pilots use them. So do doctors and construction engineers. And the humble checklist was the reason for a 47% drop in death rate across eight hospitals in 2008. Professionals trust checklists to save lives, but they’re just as valuable in business. That’s why we’ve put together two essential checklists to guide your company’s migration to the cloud. With our Enterprise Cloud Provider Checklist, you’ll learn what measurable qualifications to look for in a cloud computing partner—such as a five 9s SLA covering servers, network, and storage; and automated 14-day rolling backups. Meanwhile our Cloud Migration Considerations Checklist will help you assess your company’s cloud readiness and keep in mind all the most relevant details of moving to the cloud. Download your free checklists below: - Your Enterprise Cloud Provider Checklist - Your Cloud Migration Considerations Checklist

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