Getting started
This blog provides an overview of six cloud migration strategies. But before deep diving into these strategies. Let us look at the basics.
What is Cloud Migration?
Cloud Migration refers to migrating your business data and applications from an on-premise architecture to a cloud environment or from one cloud platform to another. Migration to the cloud is vital for companies looking to achieve digital transformation and leverage growth opportunities while preparing for disruption.
Why Cloud Migration?
Cloud Migration allows organizations to expand and grow their business painlessly by leveraging the cloud capabilities to have a tangible increase in performance and customer satisfaction and reduce costs. Enable your Cloud Migration from any workload from an on-premises environment, public cloud, and hosting facilities. With automation-enabled cloud migration, enterprises can have high availability at all times, empower Cost and Resource Optimization and enhance the Flexibility and Scalability of Applications.
What are the Cloud Migration Strategies Types?
Having realized that your organization is ready to migrate its applications to the cloud, you also need to consider the different strategies that apply to your applications targeted in the migration program.
These six approaches shall be considered while migrating your applications onto the desired cloud platform.
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Re-Hosting
- Also known as the lift-and-shift strategy
- You need to lift your application stack and shift it from your on-premises environment to the cloud.
- It involves the transportation of a replica of the current environment without making any extensive modifications.
- If your organization is looking forward to scaling a large legacy migration quickly without any optimizations, this proves to be the best approach to gaining the quickest ROI
- Optimizations or re-architecting of the applications become more accessible once they have started running on the cloud.
Re-Platforming
- Sometimes also known as the lift-tinker-and-shift strategy.
- Points to fewer optimizations or adjustments to gain some concrete benefits from the cloud
- The application's core architecture does not change.
- For example, it can be referred to as the upliftment of the application's underlying platform or a relational database management system to have them run as fully managed services on the cloud, which saves a lot of time and effort.
- Suppose you are looking forward to building your trust for the cloud platform by achieving some tangible benefits simultaneously (like improved performance). In that case, this approach tends to be a good choice.
Repurchasing
- Refers to the complete movement of your applications to a new product
- It is most commonly seen as a movement towards a SaaS platform.
- In case you have mission-critical applications that don't provide any business value but still need to adhere to strict SLAs, then it is recommended to offload your application to a service provider.
- You can consider moving your CRM to Salesforce or CMS to Drupal as an example.
- Although it can tend to be one of the most cost-effective options, one challenge to be considered is losing the existing code's familiarity and getting your team trained for the new SaaS platform.
Refactoring
- It refers to completely re-architecting your application.
- Suppose your business requires leveraging advanced cloud capabilities (like serverless computing or auto-scaling) that are otherwise difficult to achieve within the existing environment. In that case, you can choose to rebuild your applications from scratch.
- Here, you take a different perspective on the application's architecture and development to mainly use the cloud-native features.
- It benefits you with instant cloud scalability, highly improved performance, and rapid elasticity.
- It tends to be the most expensive strategy. However, it turns out to be the most beneficial one when implemented in the correct scenario to meet the business needs.
Retiring
- It simply means to get rid of applications that are no longer useful.
- Assess your enterprise's IT portfolio and identify the applications that are not useful anymore. They have not been accessed or have remained down for the past few months without noticing. This is where you need to retire them or turn them off completely.
- This strategy helps you to reduce your run-time costs.
- The resulting savings helps you to boost your overall business case.
- Also, you are left with less surface area to be secured.
Retaining
- It refers to doing nothing, i.e., keeping your workloads or applications on-premises.
- It is suitable for organizations where migration to the cloud does not make sense.
- If you cannot prioritize an application that has been upgraded recently or where the applications are required to have no communication with the outer world since they control the operational technologies, you should prefer retaining them.
- If you are not inclined to migrate the applications, don't!
- Remember, you should consider migration only if it makes sense for your business.
Conclusion
Choosing the right strategy is one of the most critical step to be considered. Your prime focus should lie over your business's requirements and objectives while developing a strategy to start with your journey towards the cloud. You should be clear about what needs to be accomplished. Start developing your migration strategy by capturing the baseline metrics of your existing IT infrastructure. You just need to have a clear baseline understanding of your current scenario, and you'll be able to establish the key performance indicators of the cloud migration.
