As organizations increasingly seek to move away from vendor lock-in and reduce Microsoft licensing costs, Google Cloud offers great value and features to simplify migration and optimize the cloud.

So say Digicloud Africa experts Louis van Schalkwyk and Sizwe Mabanga, who note that many organizations are finding that licensing costs can account for up to half of their cloud costs. Many are also discovering that without careful pre-migration planning, they fail to achieve optimized multicloud environments that support efficiency, productivity, and features like big data analytics.

Sizwe Mabanga, Google Cloud Architect and Client Engineer at Digicloud Africa, says, “Multicloud is not yet fully understood. You need to be latency aware and understand which apps and data to bundle and run in the same cloud for optimal performance. You may need to plan to collocate and consolidate some groups of apps into one, for example, for best results. Moving to the cloud is often not a lift and shift exercise, but rather an opportunity to optimize your architecture. Google Cloud makes this planning easy.”

They explain that with Google Cloud, organizations can use their own Microsoft licenses or use licenses provided by Google, paying only for what they need while getting a scalable infrastructure to improve agility and profitability. With Google Cloud infrastructure, businesses can run these applications more optimally to reduce overall costs.

Moving legacy apps to the cloud

Louis van Schalkwyk, technical operations manager at Digicloud Africa, says there are many benefits to moving legacy applications to the cloud. “For starters, it frees customers from having to manage their own hardware and infrastructure. They have access to everything they need, when they need it and for as long as they need it.

Louis van Schalkwyk – Head of Technical Operations, Digicloud Africa.

Customers do not have to purchase, install and manage the underlying servers. Once in the cloud, customers can take advantage of the services offered in the cloud in addition to the simple infrastructure. This is especially true when it comes to big data, analytics and machine learning,” he says.

Google Cloud offers special advantages, he notes: “When migrating Microsoft applications to Google Cloud, you have the added advantage that Google manages your licenses for you. You start paying for Windows and SQL licenses when you start a machine and stop paying as soon as you stop the machine. This means that you only pay for Microsoft licenses while they are in use. Some Microsoft licenses are also based on the number of CPU cores in the machine: with Google Cloud , when you change the number of cores in your server, the license used will adjust accordingly.

However, moving these legacy apps can be difficult. Van Schalkwyk says, “Legacy applications are often large monolithic applications and sometimes the underlying operating system is no longer supported in cloud environments. Monolith applications can sometimes benefit from being broken down into smaller components that run independently on cloud services.

Another challenge is their interaction with other applications on your network. If it is a high volume application (from a networking perspective), care should be taken when migrating it to the cloud. He says that for this reason, it’s important to perform a thorough inventory and network analysis of applications that communicate with each other when planning a move.

“You want to migrate workloads in a coordinated way with minimal surprises along the way,” he says. “The cloud shouldn’t just be another data center, customers should leverage managed services where possible to enjoy increased availability and reduced management time/costs. Google offers fully managed Microsoft AD and SQL for customers who want to move away from managing their own servers. »

Simplified by Google Cloud

Van Schalkwyk says Google understands that customers need to embark on a cloud journey in order to take full advantage of what their cloud has to offer. “This journey typically begins with a discovery session to analyze existing applications to determine which would be best suited for the cloud (and which would not). Google recently made its Stratozone tool available (by invitation) to This agentless tool runs on a customer’s network (local or cloud) and discovers all the machines running on it, lists the applications running on it, tracks network traffic between machines, and monitors network traffic. CPU, memory and disk usage This information is then used to help the customer create a roadmap of which applications to migrate to the cloud, what types of machines to use and if there are any managed services available at the place of migration to virtual machines.

Google offers its Velostrata tool for free to all customers migrating to Google Cloud. The tool enables customers to migrate VMs to Google Cloud quickly, securely, and at scale. It uses streaming technology to perform migrations faster and has built-in testing and rollback if needed.

Mabanga says: “Google Cloud offers customers many ways to gain flexibility, optimize their architectures and save money. With Google Cloud and Digicloud Africa, customers can access a local network of certified partners and who will use their Google Cloud experience and knowledge to ensure customers are supported by qualified technical experts and consultants every step of the way to the cloud.