What is Cloud Migration and Why Do You Need a Cloud Migration Strategy and Process?

What is Cloud Migration and Why Do You Need a Cloud Migration Strategy and Process?

Cloud migration is the process of shifting your IT infrastructure to the cloud. This is an important topic for businesses looking to move from a traditional milieu to the cloud. We are going to be looking at what cloud migration really is, what it entails, and why you need a cloud migration strategy and process. We will be looking at some of the strategies that can help you with your cloud migration and what you can keep in mind when deciding on your migration path.

What are the most significant advantages of cloud migration?

Benefits such as these encourage businesses to move their operations to the cloud: 

• Scalability

When compared to on-premises infrastructure, cloud computing can more quickly scale to serve larger workloads and more users. In the past, adding to an organization’s IT infrastructure meant buying and installing more servers, software, storage, and networks.

• Cost

The managed services provided by cloud migration providers can reduce operational costs and make upkeep activities, such as upgrades, easier to handle. Companies that make the switch to cloud computing often report huge savings in their IT budgets. They’ll have more capital available to invest in creativity, whether it means making brand-new products or enhancing existing ones.

• Performance

When it comes to performance and user satisfaction, moving to the cloud is a win-win. As the number of users or amount of data being processed grows, cloud-hosted applications and websites can easily scale to meet the demand. They can even be set up close to the end users to reduce network latency.

• The Online Setting

Employees and customers alike can use the cloud to access their data and applications from any location. This helps with digital transformation, gives customers a better experience, and gives workers access to flexible, cutting-edge tools.

Is it difficult to move to the cloud?

Moving to the cloud can be a challenging and perhaps dangerous process. Cloud migration has many benefits, but many businesses are having trouble with the following things.

Not having a plan

However, many businesses rush into cloud migration without first developing a thorough plan. End-to-end cloud migration planning is essential for a smooth transition to the cloud. It’s possible that cloud migration strategies may need to be tailored to meet the unique needs of certain applications and data sets. For any workload that is moved to the cloud, the company must have a solid business case.

Fiscal Controls

Many businesses have not defined their key performance indicators (KPIs) to know how much they will spend or save after moving to the cloud. This makes it hard to determine, from a monetary standpoint, whether or not migration was effective. In a cloud migration environment, costs can change a lot as new services are added and more applications are used.

Excluding Competing Vendors, or “Locking in,”

For those that choose to utilize cloud computing, vendor lock-in is a prevalent issue. Cloud migration provides a wide range of services, but many of them are proprietary and cannot be used with any other cloud service. Cloud migration providers are an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Even though cloud computing has clear benefits, it’s hard for many businesses to switch providers once they’ve started using it.

Protection of Private Information and Adherence to Regulations

Data security and regulatory issues are a big roadblock to cloud migration. The cloud service provider is responsible for the security of the infrastructure, while the customer is responsible for the security of their own data and applications. This is called the “shared responsibility model.”

Even if the cloud service provider offers advanced security features, it is the organization’s job to set them up and keep them in good working order.

In and of itself, migration creates safety concerns. When you move a lot of data, some of which may be sensitive, or set up application access controls in a lot of different places, you put yourself at risk.

Options for Moving to the Cloud

When deciding how to move to the cloud, businesses must weigh a number of factors. In brief, each is described below.

• Rehost Lift-and-shift hosting, also known as rehosting, is accomplished with the use of IaaS. (IaaS). Simply transfer anything you already have to the cloud migration server. This is an easy option to implement, so it is a good option for businesses without much experience in the cloud. It’s a great choice if you don’t want to change the way your apps work during the migration process, but the code is hard to change.

• Refactor: Refactoring, often known as “lift, tinker, and shift,” is making adjustments to your programs so that they run more efficiently in the cloud. The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) methodology is used here. Even while the applications’ fundamental architecture won’t change, some tweaks will be made to improve cloud-based resource utilization.

• Revise: This new approach expands on the earlier ones, necessitating even more extensive alterations to the source code and system architecture of the applications being migrated to the cloud. This is done because it may be necessary to make substantial changes to an application’s code in order to make it work with the cloud migration and all of its services. This tactic calls for forethought and expert-level understanding.

• Rebuild: To go even further than the Revise method, a new code base must be created and the old one discarded in the process known as “rebuilding.” Companies usually only think about this long process when they realize their current solutions aren’t working.

• Replace: It’s important to remember that there are alternatives to the rebuild strategy, such as the replacement method. What sets this apart is that instead of starting from scratch, the company uses an existing native app. Here, you’ll be switching to a vendor-supplied, third-party, pre-built app. All you have to bring over from your old app is the data because the rest of the features and functionality are all new.

The 4 Stages of Cloud Migration

1. Planning a Cloud Migration

Before moving data to the public cloud, it’s important to define the problem that needs to be solved. Is it going to be used as a backup plan in case of an emergency? DevOps? In which cloud migration serves as the sole host for business applications? Or perhaps a combination of both strategies is the best way to go with this deployment.

Important application data, legacy data, and application interoperability are just a few of the factors that should be considered at this phase of the transfer process. It’s also important to evaluate how dependent you are on data. Do you have data that must be resynchronized on a regular basis, data compliance obligations to meet, or non-critical data that may be migrated during the first few runs of the migration?

Figuring out which data needs to be moved and when, if it needs to be scrubbed, what type of destination volumes to use, and whether or not the data needs to be encrypted at rest and in transit can help you make a plan for the tools you’ll need.

Please refer to our comprehensive guide to cloud migration software for more related reading.

2. Rationale for migration

After figuring out what your company needs, research cloud migration providers and other partners to learn about the services you’ll need and how much they cost. Evaluate cloud migration’s anticipated advantages in terms of three key areas: operational perks, financial savings, and structural enhancements.

Create a business case for each program you want to move to the cloud, detailing the estimated TCO once you’ve made the move. You can use cloud cost calculators to get an idea of how much money you’ll spend in cloud migration in the future if you factor in important factors like the amount and type of data you plan to store, the number of servers you’ll need, the operating system(s) you plan on using, and the level of performance and networking you’ll need.

Determine potential cost reductions from your projected cloud adoption by consulting with cloud providers. There are a variety of pricing structures available from cloud service providers, with significant savings offered in exchange for a longer-term commitment to cloud resources (reserved instances) or a minimum monthly cloud spending amount (savings plans). If you want to know the real cost of cloud migration over the long term, you need to include these savings in your business plan.

3. Carrying out the Cloud Migration of Existing Data

After a thorough examination of your current setup has been completed and a migration strategy has been developed, you must put it into action. The biggest obstacle is getting the job done quickly, cheaply, and with as little interruption to business as possible throughout the move.

Your company’s operations could be negatively impacted if users are unable to access their data during the move. After the initial migration, it is just as important to keep your systems in sync and up-to-date. Before the rest of the workload is moved, each part must be tested to make sure it works well in the new environment.

Also, while the migration is in progress, you’ll need a strategy for keeping the source data in sync with any updates that are made. Later in this article, we’ll look at how migrating to the cloud with the services and features provided by Cloud migration Volumes ONTAP may benefit NetApp users, just as it can benefit customers of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

4. Routine Maintenance

It’s crucial to check that the data is optimal, safe, and simple to retrieve after it’s been moved to the cloud. It also aids in predicting workload bottlenecks and keeping tabs on any crucial infrastructure changes as they occur in real time.

To guarantee that your new environment complies with regulatory compliance regulations like HIPAA and GDPR, you should evaluate the security of the data at rest in addition to real-time monitoring.

If your RPO and RTO goals ever alter, you should also take into account the need to meet continuing performance and availability criteria.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many different aspects to a cloud migration strategy and process that you need to consider when planning a cloud migration. Cloud migrations can be complicated and costly, and they can also have a large impact on the reliability and performance of your business applications. However, migrating to the cloud is an important business decision that will pay off in the long term. By creating a cloud migration strategy and a cloud migration process, you can ensure that your business can make the most of the cloud.

About Enteros

Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.