Cloud Migration Strategy: Key Decision Points Explained

It is always important to make valid decisions for your business. While taking major decisions, you always check for cost-friendly, effective setups to rationalize your expenses. The same holds true for both businesses and people.

A thorough cloud migration strategy will required regardless of whether an organization is already partially using cloud technologies and wishes to adopt them more fully or whether it is just starting to move its data and apps to the cloud.

In this article we’ll discuss everything about Cloud Migration and why it is a better decision for your business.

What do you mean by Cloud Migration?

Moving data, applications, or other business components to the cloud is known as cloud migration. A corporation has a variety of options for moving to the cloud. One typical model is to move data and applications from an on-premises data center to a public cloud.

How to start a Cloud Migration? What does the first step include?

Businesses can greatly benefit from cloud infrastructure and public cloud solutions for a variety of reasons, including potential cost savings, anytime/anywhere access to data, high performance levels, reliable security and scalability, and quicker disaster recovery.

Naturally, the worldwide cloud computing industry is expanding quickly and is anticipated to increase at a CAGR of 18% to reach $623 billion by 2023.

However, in order to maximize the benefits of cloud migration, you must plan out a thorough strategy since there is room to prioritize the cloud migration needs of different data storages, business processes, and applications that belong to your organization. Indeed, due to regulatory or compliance constraints, some data may need to be kept on-site or in an on-premises data center rather than being stored in the cloud.

Being clear about the motivations behind your cloud migration plan should be the first step you take in the process. The optimal cloud migration approach for your company will depend on what has you thinking about moving to the cloud.

Determine your needs for a cloud server, cloud networking, cloud storage, cloud database, and cloud security/firewall as part of your cloud migration planning.

Whether it’s skateboarding while blind or an 80-year-old woman running marathons, anything that requires serious effort to succeed is true, including cloud migration.

What are the steps included in Cloud Migration?

Using checklists to keep track of crucial steps or components of a challenging process has greatly benefited surgeons and airline pilots alike. Cloud migration is a crucial and complex process for businesses, and when there are clear procedures or checklists available, the project goes much more smoothly.

A checklist’s specifics can vary from company to company (or from project manager to project manager). Here are a few ideas for inclusions:

1. Determine which IT workloads will migrate to the cloud and categorize them based on several factors such as complexity, criticality, etc.
2. Find the appropriate cloud supplier who provides the cloud services you require.
3. Calculate the migration’s cost thoroughly.
4. Assign a team to carry out the cloud transfer effectively.
5. Make the migration team’s understanding of the migration’s objectives clear.
6. Consider carefully which migration duties will be handled internally versus those that the cloud provider will handle.
7. Prioritize the workloads for migration with care, deciding which ones need to go to the cloud first, which ones should come next, and so on.
8. Create a plan with a schedule and a road map for the migration to the cloud.
9. Update all interested parties on what to expect before, during, and after the cloud migration.
10. List any cloud-based applications that the company uses and decide whether to replace them with different cloud-based services or leave them alone.
11. Prepare a security strategy for both the migration to the cloud and the period following the migration.
12. Establish KPIs for various migration-related metrics, such as application performance and user experience.
13. Completely test each application and workload; after review, make changes as necessary.

What are the different types of Cloud Migration?

Considering the fact that there are different types of Cloud model, it is important for you to choose an appropriate version for yourself. Once you decide which version of cloud model, you can proceed with analyzing which type of cloud migration suits you.

Here we are mentioning the six common approaches to cloud migration. It revolves around a term called six R’s of migration.

1. Rehosting: You could move your complete software/product stack from on-premises hosting to cloud hosting if you want to take a cautious approach to cloud adoption. This is the quickest and least dangerous technique to migrate to the cloud. Additionally, you are omitting some of the most potent and sophisticated cloud computing features and functionalities, such CI/CD, monitoring systems, recovery automation, containerization, or services that are compatible with open-source software. An application, virtual machine, and operating system are simply lifted and moved from their existing location to a public cloud environment. Companies using this method of cloud migration will pick an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider and recreate their application, with the cloud provider handling virtualization, servers, storage, and networking while the company handles the application, data, runtime, middleware, and OS.
2. Replatforming: With a few modifications and refinements to optimize things for the cloud, this is comparable to the rehosting cloud migration process. You might be able to keep using your legacy technology, such mainframes, with this methodology. Companies that use this cloud migration method might characterized as conservative businesses that are experimenting with cloud computing or putting their toes in the water and are unsure of the advantages of cloud adoption. This cloud migration strategy calls for testing application performance to confirm any minor changes that may have made to the code base rather than rebuilding the complete program to be cloud native.
3. Refactoring/Re Architecting: Although these two concepts sometimes used synonymously, refactoring relates to optimizing cloud-based apps under a Platform as a Service (PaaS) setup, whilst rearchitecting tends to refer to a more thorough redesign of the application code. Updates to. Net or Java program components are examples of refactoring. You might be able to take advantage of cloud features like auto-scaling, containerization, microservices, or server-less computing by rearchitecting. You are well-positioned to benefit in the long run from creative opportunities by re-architecting your application’s logic to make it cloud-native.
4. Replacing/Repurchasing: It may be ideal to embrace various cloud-native apps like Salesforce for CRM if you are finally ready to give up your traditional infrastructure and switch to the cloud. A cloud-based SaaS program will normally go to the cloud, and just the data will need to transferred. If you are using a legacy system that is out of date for the modern, dynamic, and competitive business environment, this can be quite cost-effective. The main difficulty is that staff members will need instruction on the new app or platform.
5. Retaining: Organizations occasionally may need to use on-premises infrastructure to execute a particular application. It might be a crucial program operating on old mainframes. Or, there might be information that you need to maintain on hand for compliance or regulatory purposes. It’s possible that you’re not yet prepared to move some applications to the cloud. It would be logical to use a hybrid cloud migration plan in this situation, keeping some of your workloads in their present environments and moving others to the cloud.
6. Retiring: You might discover that some of the applications, environments, or other IT workloads can shut down without having any detrimental effects on productivity or your company in any way when you evaluate your application portfolio as part of your cloud migration strategy. In this case, it would be preferable to stop using those apps or switch to alternative services or parts. Cost reductions, storage optimization, reduced need for license payments, and other benefits may result from this.

What are the scenarios around Cloud Computing?

Any company that wants to stay in business should use cloud computing. Your company may be performing admirably in your industry, but you can see that on-site technology, such as servers, is reaching its technological limits or is getting close to needing to replaced. You would be better off entering the cloud where you have access to cutting edge computing resources and limitless storage with the most recent cloud security technologies, rather than spending a fortune upgrading your on-premises setup, which may or may not be an in-house data center.

You might be a startup wanting to invest a significant amount of money in a marketing campaign. If customers flood your e-commerce site and it crashes right away, your marketing spend would wasted. Because of the elasticity of cloud technologies, server capacities can configured to increase automatically in response to online traffic. When you use cloud technology, your website will be able to survive harmful attacks like DDoS attacks, viruses, and worse. It also won’t crash under heavy traffic.

You can be the manager of a software development company that makes use of DevOps to maximize the productivity of its developers. You have successfully eliminated the silos by implementing DevOps techniques. However, you must make your procedures cloud-based if you want to fully benefit from DevOps. Cloud DevOps will assist in automating procedures so that DevOps may operate at its finest and most efficiently with automatic resource provisioning and other advantages.

What are the use cases for Cloud Migration?

Cloud Migration is an advanced option which makes it a favorable option for companies in the current market scenario. Depending upon your company, Cloud Migration can have tons of uses and can be effective in much more ways. Here are top most uses for Cloud Migration:

1. Elastic Web Hosting: When website traffic experiences abrupt spikes, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capabilities provided by public cloud service providers are a huge help. With the available cloud management tools, it’s simple to scale up as needed to ensure that consumers have a seamless experience when browsing your website or making a purchase on your e-commerce site.
2. Making use of Big Data: Numerous data points on user behavior gathered, analyzed, and monetized by businesses of various types, including retail and social media. In actuality, the majority of businesses gather data to acquire understanding and enhance marketing, product development, and many other areas. IaaS-based cloud services can be incredibly beneficial in these situations for analyzing and interpreting this information, which can be a big competitive advantage for that organization.
3. Accessible Disaster Recovery: Organizations can benefit from the almost limitless data storage that the cloud provides by setting up automatic data backups. This in turn helps when the unthinkable catastrophe occurs because you may quickly resume operations thanks to this PaaS capability.
4. Empowering Software Development: Before the cloud, developing, testing, and deploying software took years. Software development teams have a significantly more synergistic method with cloud-based PaaS solutions. DevOps is currently taking place in the cloud; this results in quicker software releases, continuous deployment of code, and more. Thanks to cloud capabilities like process automation, code compilation, and others, the process of developing software has become more robust.

Conclusion

Cloud Computing in the current and coming market has a lot to offer. It brings out all the essential benefits that an organization requires. It provides businesses with a platform which encompasses benefits, infrastructure, proper management, security and other services.

There are certain concepts in the market which require a vast knowledge to deliver proper results. Efficient results lead to proper growth of your organization. A longer term study even shows that in the coming years, Cloud Computing expected to grow rapidly.