1)Background before migration:

Coca cola one of the largest multinational beverage corporation , has its business presence in more than 200 countries and it’s one of the biggest sponsor of many sport events (Eg: Super Bowl ) , Television shows (Eg: American Idol ) and many events in theme parks ( DisneyLand events ). Having said that it was supposed to host huge enterprise applications to meet the global business requirement. On the other end, they have a dynamic ad hoc requirement of hardware and software for handling sales division for different marketing strategies (Eg: Events Video streaming ) that will be organized across different parts of the globe. With this kind of business requirement it’s always a challenge for coca-cola to stay connected and be consistent to handle all the use cases from truck drivers to top class executives across the globe with almost a data center in every country in which it is operating for almost a couple of decades.

2)Business Goals behind cloud migration:

It’s always a challenge for the coca cola to focus on IT which is not core business of the organization , therefore it’s goal is to focus more on business to compete against the competitors and reduced focus on IT maintenance , When we say reducing focus on IT, it wants make use of industry technology experts to take care of such infrastructure so that most of the IT challenges can be handled by the service provider . With this context coca cola want to migrate to cloud and would like to get the benefit of the cloud.Following are the some of key goals that they want to address as a part of cloud migration

Operational cost: Wants to reduce the overall operational cost in terms of infrastructure and resources.

Accountability: It’s always a challenge for the coca-cola to find out the exact RCA about what went wrong as there is no single point of accountability in terms of operations and resources with its diverse business locations . They want to address this problem as it can quickly help them to do proper RCA for any issue and increase the productivity.

Unpredictable customer needs : When hosting big events like live video streaming , it’s always a challenge for coca cola to predict the load, sometimes they used to allocate more resources upfront , even then due to huge demand they used to have loss of service with unpredictable load. Sometimes even if they allocate more resources, it used to end up with under usage . Therefore predicting customers need was always a huge challenge and they want to address this as a part of cloud migration.

Centralized View : With Data centers scattered across the globe along with numerous applications, it’s always tough for coca cola to have high level dashboard view of the total infrastructure. Therefore they would like to address this, so that it help to plan and act accordingly.

Upgrade : Constant upgrade of hardware and software is the next big challenge that coca cola want to address as a part of cloud migration.

Real Time Data: Providing a real time information about its product promotions and services to all its customers and vendors across the globe. They want to take advantage of real time services provided by service providers.

Compliance: Need to have to have records for longer durations for audit and other SOX complaint related tasks..

3)Technology Drivers/Goals (E.g. Improved Availability by X, scalability, performance, Security)

Scalability: At peak load, coca-cola wants to scale the applications , as it can reduce the cost to them. In on prem model, they used to have more resources at any point of time to avoid any scalability issues, However with migration to cloud the goal is to have auto scaling on demand. This can reduce a huge cost for the organization.

Availability: With customers spanning across the globe, availability is the big thing that they looked at. They want to deploy their instances in different regions with replication and clustering to address the availability issues.

Technology Stack: With rapidly evolving technology, it’s mandatory for any organization to be on par with the latest technologies. The goal in technology stack for coca cola is to make use of best services offered by cloud vendors like IOT and Machine learning services which can help them to make better business decisions in quick time along with developing smart vending machines.

Security: Improved security is the imp goal that coca cola wants to look at, with the kind of region support provided by cloud vendors along with replication, it can help them to keep the environments isolated and can help , when there are any intruders into the application in one region. Apart from the this, migrating to cloud can help them to have constant security updates.

Performance : When working on Streaming live events, performance was a real challenge for coca- cola and they would like to address this with effective cloud solutions .

4) Migration Strategy:
Coca cola followed multi cloud vendor along with hybrid cloud model, to be more specific it tried to use best of different cloud vendors like Amazon Cloud and Google Cloud computing for making use of cloud services. With respect to migration they adopted Hybrid model , where they started migrating solutions one after other to cloud, with both on-prem and cloud solutions running together. Also to add the reason why cocal has chosen multi vendor model in spite of being expensive model is because of the coverage and the different services offered by different vendors .

5) Migration Journey:
Coca- cola started its journey migrating its servers to HP in early 2009 and then they partnered with cisco to host their servers in order to reduce its infrastructure. Now it is partnering with Google cloud and Amazon web services for different cloud services along with its infrastructure .It’s taking considerable amount of time for coca cola to migrate all its legacy systems either by upgrading them or using them as is. Apart from just upgrading, it took lot of time for them to test all the cloud hosted API and applications. It first started migrating consumer applications and then started migrating business applications towards cloud. It has almost two thousand products deployed over cloud as of now and by 2019 coca cola will be completing most of its migration towards cloud.Also to add in terms of cloud services , coca cola in its current journey widely used IAAS, PAAS services from amazon and saas services from Google and Microsoft.

Services being used by coca cola with different cloud vendors:

AWS: Elastic beanstalk, S3 , AWS Cloud formation , DynoDB, VPC, EC instances etc.
Google: BigQuery analytics, DoubleClick an ad-serving software , Digital Signage systems
Microsoft: Office 365 , Collaboration tools.

6) Organization change:
More automation helped to focus more on core business.Learning curve has been increased.Smaller projects as most of the frameworks and products are provided by cloud vendors.Organization vision is dependent on the cloud service provider vision as well. Change in roles and responsibilities helped to adopt the organization to be more robust.

7) Cultural change:
Use of more Open source technologies by the IT department to have more open integration with cloud services.Technology skill set upgrade , this required either existing employees to upgrade to new skill sets, or to add new employees with latest cloud skill sets , in either cases the first choice is always to understand cloud technologies.Introduction of Devops helped to resolve the issue quickly.Communication playing important role as there is a regular interaction with cloud service providers. Agile development mode introduced for faster and accountable deliverables.Adopting to usage of new tools.

8) Outcomes Achieved.
Enough room to work on Core business innovation , which in turn helped to increase the revenue. Fair allocation of resources with on demand supply model
Intelligent and Faster Report generation. Report generation reduced from couple of hours to minutes.( Close to 15 min from 3 to 4 hours ). This helped to make quick analysis and take quick decisions by business teams.Analyzing technical issues present in logs and converting them to business related information by applying cloud analytics.40% Reduction of operational costs as the resource maintenance is reduced drastically. 80% reduction in customer ticket because of complete automation, which is a sign of customer satisfaction.Zero downtime deployments helping to provide uninterrupted services to customers.Dashboard view of total infrastructure helped to understand the total coca cola echo systems. Devops life became easy with components like aws elastic beanstalk. There is quick turn around time for resolving the issues.Self service features provided by cloud service providers increased the pace of deliverables. Easy fraud monitoring.Location based advertising which increased sales. Products like digital signage systems which are powered by google cloud helped them to achieve this.

9) Migration Strategy I suggest :

Every cloud migration will experience a phase of cloud transition where application will move from one pane of glass to another pane of glass. No customer likes to experience sudden cloud transition . Therefore the best strategy i recommend is to to have be a period of existence where both environments ( on prem and cloud ) will be active and then gradually make all the services available over the cloud. It’s highly recommended to start migration with less sensitive data and components and then gradually shift all the components taking downtime, security , scalability , availability and other features into consideration.Coming to how we migrate the entire set of applications to cloud ideally depends on the type services provided by cloud provider. Oracle provides components like Remote Agents , Application Bridge and Provisioning gateways for getting the data from on prem solutions as a part of their cloud offerings. Similarly amazon provides different components like snowball, Direct connect and other services , which we can choose depending on the type of requirement.

Sources: Above views are just my personal views from different sources like Youtube, Amazon reinvent and other websites.