Cloud Migration Complete Beginner Guide for 2022 |
Posted: July 19, 2022 |
Constant evolution is one rule the IT services industry lives by. New trends and technologies surface each year, while the old ones go obsolete. The legacy systems may have fueled your business growth at some time. But today, they can hold you back. The only way you can stay in the game is through cloud migration. What is Cloud Migration?Cloud migration is moving digital assets like infrastructure, data, applications, and workloads to a public or private cloud environment. The end goal of the approach is to increase security and ensure stability.
The cloud migration can happen from the legacy environment to the cloud or from one cloud service provider to another. Also, depending on your needs, you can move all or just a few digital assets. What are the Top Benefits of Cloud Migration?Following are the benefits you can reap by migrating your digital assets to the cloud: 1. Reduced Costs You might already know how you have to bear many maintenances and upgrade costs. But when you migrate to the cloud, all these things become the cloud service provider's responsibility.
Therefore you can reduce these costs by a significant extent and shift your time, resources, and focus towards delivering Innovation.
2. Increased Performance Applications and websites that run on the cloud can quickly scale up or down to accommodate the user needs and the website traffic. Also, there is less network latency as apps can run from servers near the location of end-users. All these factors can ultimately enhance the performance of your app/website.
3. Faster Innovation Migrating to the cloud can offer your team greater agility and allow them to deliver Innovation faster to end-users. Providing such innovative experiences on legacy systems will be expensive and impossible.
4. Scalability Scalability is a significant advantage that cloud migration has to offer. In traditional IT environments, you need to purchase or set up physical servers, buy new software licenses, and network equipment to scale up your business services. However, your digital assets and servers can quickly scale up or down in the cloud environment based on your requirements. Four Cloud Migration Challenges That You Might FaceWhile cloud computing is promising, it is a risky initiative. Here are some challenges that you might face while migrating to the cloud: 1. Lack of Strategy Jumping into action without planning anything is a sure shot way to failure. Despite this, many organizations start cloud migration without spending time on strategy. As a result, they often fail to meet their goals and face difficulties. The only way to resolve this issue is to devote sufficient time and attention to the strategy before cloud migration. A rigorous cloud migration planning will ensure everything goes as per plan.
2. Cost Management While migrating to the cloud, most companies also face difficulty managing costs. It usually happens when they don't have clear KPIs to decide where they should spend their money and where they should save it.
Also, there are times when cloud migration is successful but not efficient from an economic point of view. Another difficulty most companies face is that costs frequently change in a cloud environment.
Careful planning can be a viable solution for this challenge. When you have clearly defined your goals and have a well-thought plan, you can easily save costs.
3. Vendor Lock-in Vendor lock-in is another major challenge you might face during cloud migration. Sometimes you might subscribe to cloud service providers only to realize later that you can't extend their services to other cloud platforms. To overcome this challenge, do thorough research before choosing a cloud service provider. Carefully analyze their policies along with their charging fee. The idea is to ensure you can easily switch to another vendor if the current cloud service provider doesn't meet your requirements.
4. Data Security & Compliance Cloud services operate on a shared responsibility model, and the cloud provider secures the infrastructure while you have to secure data and workloads. Now, ensuring data security and compliance is a whole new challenge. Since you are moving large volumes of data, there can be significant exposure. Without appropriate security protocols, you risk your data falling into the wrong hands. To overcome this challenge, ensure your data is protected with appropriate security protocols, access controls, and other preventive measures. Cloud Migration Strategies: The Five Rs of Cloud MigrationGartner has identified five cloud migration techniques, also known as the five Rs of cloud migration. Let's learn about all of them in brief:
Rehost Also known as lift and shift, the rehost approach involves redeploying your existing digital assets (like data and applications) on the cloud. The approach is simple and well-suited for organizations unfamiliar with the cloud. You can also use this approach to keep your app intact or if you find it too difficult to modify the code.
Refactor The refactoring approach is also known as lift, tinker, and shift. In the approach, we optimize your existing app for the cloud before redeploying it. The core of the app remains the same, and only a few adjustments are made to accommodate better the app for using cloud-based tools.
Revise In the revised approach, we make significant changes to the architecture and the code to ensure your app can take full advantage of available services. It is a crucial cloud migration approach that requires much-advanced knowledge and foreplanning.
Rebuild The rebuild cloud migration strategy takes a more radical approach by completely discarding the existing digital assets and building new ones from scratch. The rebuild approach takes a lot of time. Therefore, we suggest you use it only if you feel your existing apps fail to meet your current business requirements.
Replace In the replace approach, we migrate to a third-party, pre-built application provided by our vendor. Then, we migrate the existing application's data to the cloud app. Four-Step Cloud Migration ProcessStep 1: Planning The first step to cloud migration is planning. Only when you have a plan can you ensure nothing goes wrong later on and you meet your business goals. Following are the questions you must ask yourself during the planning phase: ? What is your end goal with the cloud migration? ? What factors will govern cloud migration? ? Do you regularly need to sync data? ? What data compliance requirements do you must meet? All these questions will ensure you have a solid base ready before you decide to migrate to the cloud. You are aware of which tools you need, which data you need to relocate, and what metrics you need to measure your Performance.
Step 2: A Migration Business Case Once you have a migration plan ready, the next step is to build a strong business case. This is where you will understand the services offered by different cloud providers and see how you can leverage them for your benefit.
To build a strong business case, clearly explain the expected total cost of ownership (TCO) on the cloud and compare it with your current TCO. For this, you can use cloud cost calculators. Although, make sure you're making realistic assumptions and considering all the scenarios. You wouldn't want to make overestimated calculations only to realize that things are going south later.
Step 3: Executing the Cloud Migration The next step will be to execute the cloud migration. Although, it is easier said than done, and you will meet many challenges along the way. The biggest hurdle will be to execute the cloud migration at the lowest cost, with minimal interruption, and in the shortest possible time.
Synchronizing changes made to source data and ensuring data is accessible to users during migration are some other challenges.
Step 4: Ongoing Maintenance Once you have successfully migrated your digital assets to the cloud, you must ensure they are secure, optimized, and at the peak of Performance. Therefore, you must monitor data for real-time changes and Performance.
Besides real-time monitoring, you must pay attention to data security and compliance standards so that users can always access it without hassle. Why Should You Take an Expert's Help in Cloud Migration?As we pointed out earlier, cloud migration is a challenging initiative. Unless you have an expert team, the right tools, and a well-thought strategy - there are greater chances of facing difficulties. Besides, laying out a roadmap and choosing the right cloud services provider is daunting.
An expert in cloud migration services can take an unnecessary load off your shoulders, and it can help you transform your operations and make your business more productive. Also, if anything goes wrong during the cloud migration journey, a cloud migration expert always has your back. You must hire an expert to aid your cloud migration efforts.
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