Introduction to Cloud Migration
Cloud migration involves moving essential data, applications, and business parts/objects from an organization's on-premises computers to cloud computing environments. Key elements for Cloud Migration have become a huge boom by taking a business forward due to it, the potential of a system, and client satisfaction/reliability increases.Why do we need Cloud Migration?
Migrating to the cloud improves operational performance and swiftness, expandability, and security. Here are some of the advantages related to cloud migration:- Cost-effective (pay-as-you-go).
- Scalable
- Privacy and Security
- Less Infrastructure Complexity
- Less maintenance
How to Choose a Cloud Migration Strategy?
Choosing the right Cloud Migration Strategy is crucial and critical for any organization. When a company is ready to migrate its applications to the cloud, various strategies need to considered for applications targeted in the migration program. These six approaches shall be considered while migrating your applications onto the desired cloud platform.
The following steps of cloud migration is planning. next stage in the process of cloud migration is the planning. But how to plan the migration? What are the substages in planning? Well, it depends on the strategy you choose. You will get to know the most common cloud migration strategies from our article: 6 Cloud Migration Strategies: How To Choose the Proper One?What are the Cloud Migration Steps?
Modernizing mission critical applications requires cloud migration. Based on our learnings we have build a 11- step process that we swear by.
- Step 1: Establish the Cloud migration Architect Role.
- Step 2 - Assess your Organization's Readiness
- Step 3 - Estimate the costs and ROI
- Step 4 - Analyse the Complexity of your Data and Applications
- Step 5 - Choose the Right Cloud Vendor
- Step 6 - Develop a Cloud Migration Strategy
- Step 7 - Select the right solution partner
- Step 8 - Prepare for the Move
- Step 10 - Production SwitchOver
- Step 11 - On-demand Scalability and Cost Optimizations
What are the Key Elements for Cloud Migration?
There are 6 key elements for successful Cloud Migration.Strategy Planning for Migrating to Cloud
Moving to the cloud is simple if you intend, set up, and plan accurately. As you move your entire business from an on-prem/legacy system to a new system, problems may occur. Mishandling a cloud migration results in potential information loss, security and privacy breaches, etc. That is why you should prepare a good cloud migration strategy/roadmap that fulfills all your business requirements and objectives along with the technological side. More broadly, you should be focusing on two components, that is: Migration of Applications: involves moving existing applications to your new cloud platform. You might need to modify some apps to make them cloud-friendly, like serverless computing, cloud storage, etc. Migration of Data/Information: Existing data/information needs to migrate to the cloud and used with your migrated applications. Migrating the data also includes conversions, schemas, databases, and many more.Finding/Selecting Right Cloud Migration Service Provider
Moving forward, you want to opt for the right cloud platform provider for your desired environment and requirements. You will need support/advisors who help you in the process, look for the facilities, tools, and services available for easy migration if using that particular cloud platform. Your responsibilities will be based upon the type of cloud services you want to choose and use, be it IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS.Identify Applications to Migrate
There could be cases where not all the applications come out to be cloud-friendly because every application is different. Some might run optimally on the private cloud, and some will work optimally on hybrid or public. So it's your task to do a proper analysis of the application before actually migrating it. You should look into your existing infrastructure regarding the applications running, the resources allocated/assigned, configuration, and other details. This way, you can better examine your infrastructure and provide you ease while migrating the data over the cloud. Here are some of the evaluations:- What services/applications can be moved directly?
- Level of complexity while doing modifications to the application to make it cloud-friendly.
- Check for the services and tools available with the cloud provider that ease out the process of modification workloads, if any.
- If migrating the system from on-prem to cloud, the cost analysis also needs to be done to check whether the investment in cloud infrastructure is worth it or not, whether the productivity increases or not.
- The choice between opting out of the best cloud environment (hybrid, public or private) needs to complete after the analysis based upon security and cost-effectiveness.
- Proper validation and review of the architecture need to be done, and create a checklist of applications that should be migrated and don't need to be migrated.
Security of Data
Be careful while migrating. For that time, your data will be under threat or breaches, as during the migration from on-prem system to the cloud environment, the vulnerability to breach increases. There should be a migration team that should recognize all your business's compliance needs and requirements while handling the important data/information. The industries like finance and e-commerce businesses, the cloud resolution provided by your migration team should give the correct security measures to match the business rules. Most of the cloud providers deliver encrypted data after the successful upload. Manage Data Access: Additionally, you should also take the user access to your notice. With proper RBAC(Role-Based Access), you will be able to carry the information about users you want access to provide access so that they will complete their jobs.Execute the Strategy
Migrating from legacy systems/on-prem to cloud is very amusing and exciting; however, it could be a very large job/task. Everybody should start the migration in smaller, manageable steps to make sure business continuity and consistency. Small and planned steps could help learn the working of an application and its sub-applications. While most of the data will be getting managed on a legacy system and the applications are starting to migrate to the cloud would help the business as consistency will always be there. In the initial phase of migration, some useful tips are migrating less essential data first to the cloud.Evaluate Migration
Post-migration evaluation is also necessary to check what went successful and what causes the issues in between. You also need to find out a solution to those issues that occurred in the migration process. That's where the migration in small parts becomes helpful as you will be having all the records/tracks of the migration process. Resource optimization after post-migration is something you should always keep track of. As you move forward in the cloud, make sure the plans are proper for distributing the migrated application resources.Conclusion
Moving your applications and information to the cloud offers several advantages like reduced prices, inflated security and measurability, a lot of management, and gaining a competitive edge. However, there are many challenges organizations should resolve to migrate to the cloud successfully. These challenges will be overcome by the proper use of the cloud migration strategy. Following the small steps while migration, the key elements above offer you great scope and learning, even ensure no harm is done to the business.- Click to explore Cloud Migration Strategy and Solutions
- Read more about MicroServices Application Migration from AWS to Oracle Cloud
