Google Launches All-in-One Cloud Migration Program

Google has launched a new migration program for cloud customers, aimed at accelerating the speed in which cloud migration happens and enabling customers to move more of their workloads onto the cloud. Called the Rapid Migration Program (RaMP), it will combine all of Google’s cloud products, engagement models, and best practices into an all-in-one program. It will also work with channel partners to support best practices for integrations with Google Cloud. 

“We’re going to bring everything into one motion with RaMP, which is our biggest investment and focus area for accelerating cloud migrations to date,” said Stephen Orban, Google Cloud’s vice president of migrations, to CRN. “We’re working very closely with partners to align our best practices with their approach, with a goal of 10Xing how quickly and reliably our customers are able to migrate so they can see faster value of moving to the cloud and fund more of those new initiatives.” 

See also: You’ve Migrated to the Cloud, Now What? 4 Critical Cost-Saving Practices

Google’s RaMP deck aims to be a “single source of truth” for customers, partners, and account teams, improving consistency in migration efforts and ensuring that cloud teams can accelerate efforts. Through this program, businesses can create objectives and key results and track their progress, while also identifying risks that would potentially block progress. 

Google has a few tools that it has built to improve migration efforts, which will all be available as part of RaMP. StratoZone is an assessment migration service built by Google, which provides businesses with guidance on how to properly migrate infrastructure to Google Cloud. Another assessment tool available on RaMP is MFit, which is an application or server assessment tool to see if is applicable for containerization or modernization. 

Cloud has seen a lot of growth over the past three years, with the pandemic solidifying the need for migration in a lot of businesses. However, most are still dipping their toes into the cloud, rather than fully migrating workflows and operations. According to Orban, many customers have goals of 75 to 100 percent of workflows being on the cloud in a few years, but are only five to 10 percent of the way there with a rough outline of the future roadmap. 

This slow migration is often the case with new technologies, as companies in general are risk averse and would like to see large improvements either in revenue generation or productivity before fully investing. The issue, at least with cloud computing, is by shifting less than 10 percent of operations to the cloud, businesses miss out on some of the benefits of having most operations running on cloud. 

Even though Orban mentions that businesses he talks to aim to have 75 to 100 percent of operations cloud-driven in the next five years, most businesses see hybrid cloud solutions as the permanent destination for their migration efforts. According to Hornetsecurity’s hybrid cloud adoption survey, 67 percent of respondents see hybrid cloud as the future. 

Google Cloud is still a distant third place in cloud computing market share, behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. That said, it is also growing at the fastest rate in terms of revenue, and has recently become profitable after many years of unprofitability, which is a sign of maturation of contracts and operations.