It’s safe to say that we can expect myriad convergent technologies and customer expectations in the coming years that will transform the way we work, the way we use applications, and the way we collect, store, process, and analyze data, will change.
Pandemic-driven behaviors and technology trends promise significant changes, and these equally dynamic changes must be accompanied by a robust cloud strategy to combine digital transformation efforts with innovation and modern business needs.
Organizations need to shape their future by planning and understanding how their processes and workloads will be impacted by technological change over the next decade, making cloud migration strategies even more important to ensure goals align with corporate strategies for the future Workplace and digital facilitation are matched and data processing.
Easier said than done, there are many problems to solve, as well as time constraints and costs to consider.
In this blog, we cover the most important aspects of your cloud migration plan.The benefits you will enjoy and the potential challenges you need to consider, all designed to help you complete your cloud journey.
Cloud migration benefits
The cloud is no longer a trend, it’s a necessity. Enterprises should migrate their on-premises applications and modernize their systems with a robust cloud migration strategy that takes advantage of the flexibility, speed, agility, processing power, and cost-efficiency of the cloud.
The largest public cloud providers in the industry include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. Depending on your organization’s workloads, you can determine which solution is best for you.
A solid cloud migration strategy prioritizes cost, workloads, capacity, documentation, architecture, availability, outages, communities, and more. Adapt, improve and adapt to the modern needs of your company. Every organization is unique, so your cloud migration strategy should be tailored to your specific needs.
Here are the key benefits of a carefully planned cloud migration strategy:
- Cost-effectiveness. On-premises applications are notoriously expensive to maintain. Planning your cloud migration helps you map the sources and outcomes of your workloads, which can be different at each tier. The migration can take months or years if this mapping exercise is not done thoroughly, increasing costs.
- Application modernization. When the pandemic was announced in 2020, there was a colossal shift in the way we work. All work and workloads have been moved online, putting application modernization at the heart of every IT conversation. Modern, containerized application workloads are the norm, meaning organizations must be cloud-ready within the next five years, accelerating the global health crisis.
- Scalability at your fingertips. Cloud migration strategies help you harness the power of high scalability that comes with your presence in the cloud. Cloud-based applications are easy to scale and always available.
- Improved security. Cloud-based applications allow users to access application data from anywhere, anytime. Because the cloud is so easily accessible from virtually anywhere, vulnerabilities are exposed and create openings for cybercriminals to sneak in and attack. A robust cloud migration strategy gives organizations more control over the different layers of security they want to build into their applications.
Cloud migration strategy
The 6 Rs of cloud migration strategies are: retire, retain, re-host, re-platform, refactor, and re-architect, which we’ll explore in detail next:
- Retiring. Discover areas of your business that can be easily migrated to the cloud and identify users in each of these workloads to determine their impact. Define workloads or features that can be retired or replaced with standard cloud features.
- Retaining. Not all workload elements are intended for migration to the cloud and should remain intact. For example, components whose migration costs are simply too high or that are still in the phase-out phase.
- Rehosting. A popular migration technique that many in the industry refer to as “Lift and Shift”. Rehosting serves as a quick fix to move specific workloads to the cloud with little effort. For those new to cloud, rehosting is the best option as it involves moving physical and virtual servers to an IaaS solution. Infrastructure such as servers, network hardware, storage and virtualized environment are located there.
- Re-platforming. Older companies generally prefer this option because it allows you to emulate applications through a virtual machine, making older systems compatible with cloud technologies. This option can be expensive, but is suitable for companies that cannot redesign their legacy systems for a full cloud migration.
- Refactoring/rearchitecting. Refactoring, typically preferred by organizations looking to add functionality or access ultimate scalability capabilities, helps increase flexibility, productivity, and collaboration. This is usually the most expensive of all options.
- Repurchasing. You can quickly and easily redeem your application as a cloud-based application to access SaaS features tailored to your unique business needs.
Cloud migration is the most pressing reality for organizations looking to meet modern requirements and support healthy functionality. Legacy hardware and data centers cause more problems than moving to the cloud, but before you embark on such a monumental project, you need to carefully consider how you will manage your application’s migration to the cloud.
How to manage application cloud migration
Migrating to the cloud is neither cheap nor easy, but the benefits far outweigh the challenges. However, you must plan ahead to ensure these challenges are fully understood, so here they are:
- Budget went wild. Cloud Migration doesn’t come with a playbook or metrics that you can compare to see how you’re doing, but for Luckily they exist. A few things you can do is be careful about costs so you don’t break the bank.
- Data safety and compliance. It’s all about data these days, and it’s actually one of the reasons companies are very cautious about migrating to the cloud. Cloud services have a shared responsibility model where you are committed to protecting the infrastructure, but you are responsible for protecting data and workloads. It is up to you to configure the security controls to configure the proposed security measures. Moving massive amounts of data comes with risks and risk of data loss, so it is important to pay special attention to this challenge.
So, what are the cloud migration steps you can take to make your life easier? We have you covered:
- Planning. Specify the cloud use case for your business. Take a close look at your environment and workloads to identify aspects that will impact your migration, such as: B. Legacy code, interoperability, critical data, data dependency, etc. With a clear picture of these elements, you can develop a comprehensive plan with tools and resources that you will need during your migration.
- Building a business case. Cloud migration justification is an exercise in understanding the cloud services you use most often, their benefits and costs. Developing a business case for cloud migration confirms that the business needs identified during the planning phase are realistic and offer real value to your organization.Consider your storage needs, compute resources, operating systems, network requirements, and more when building your business case for cloud. Explore and compare the offerings of different cloud service providers and their pricing models to determine which one is right for you.
- Executing the migration. The key to a successful cloud migration is taking all the necessary steps to ensure minimal disruption to day-to-day operations at the lowest cost and in the shortest possible time. Seems easy enough, right? Well, if you have the right planning and the right business case, you’ll find that the actual migration will be painless, but there are always risks and issues that can go wrong no matter what you plan.Be sure to test elements of your workload to ensure the migration was successful.
- Post-migration maintenance. Store data and activities in a cloud-optimized, secure and manageable environment. Monitor changes, failures, or other indicators that can help assess system security or predict future loads.
Google Cloud Migration
Google Cloud Platform is a public and direct competitor to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, which we will discuss later. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is quite small compared to the other two cloud giants, but is evolving rapidly with its unique focus on modern, containerized workloads and the ability to run AI-powered models who are constantly learning.
Some of the key advantages of GCP are:
- Costs. With GCP, you pay every second and get discounts when your instances are long running. Organizations estimate the cost to be 40-50% lower than other options.
- Migration. You can migrate workloads between virtual machines with virtually no downtime.
- Privacy. With Google’s private global fiber optic network, you get fast, direct connectivity between your organization’s data centers.
Security. The security measures of all Google products are enterprise-grade and have a global reach.
AWS Cloud Migration
AWS is probably the biggest name in the public cloud today. With over 100 AWS Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud services, you have everything you need to set up a scalable, comprehensive, and automated computing environment.
Many prefer AWS for its affordability, resource utilization, and new infrastructure features, making it the preferred choice for many organizations. Here are some of the benefits of migrating to the AWS cloud that make it an industry favorite:
- Functionality. AWS offers more services and more features than any other cloud provider. Whether you need storage, databases, AI, data lakes, IoT capabilities, and more, AWS is your one-stop shop to find everything faster, easier, and cheaper.
- Community. With almost everyone using AWS, it’s safe to say that it also has the largest and most rewarding community of global partners, from startups to corporations to public sector organizations. . The AWS Partner Network consists of thousands of system integrators who are specialists in AWS services.
- Security. The AWS architecture is flexible and secure; designed to meet and/or exceed the needs of military companies, global banks and other highly sensitive organizations with 230 security, compliance and administrative services and functions. AWS also supports 90 security standards and compliance certifications.
Azure Cloud Migration
Azure Cloud is the latest addition to the three most popular cloud service providers. Developed by Microsoft, the Azure cloud offers reduced IT costs and improved performance. With over 200 cloud products and services, this platform was built to solve today’s challenges like managing applications across multiple clouds, on-premises and at the network edge.
Many organizations favor Azure Cloud because:
- It includes over 90 compliance lists, making it the industry’s largest portfolio
- It is used by over 55% of Fortune 500 companies;
- It has invested over $1 billion annually in cybersecurity to protect customer data;
- It is ready for the future thanks to Microsoft’s continuous improvement methods.
Cloud migration challenges
Migrating to the cloud is a monumental feat that must be undertaken with care and caution. As highlighted in this blog post, a cloud migration strategy makes all the difference and can streamline your move to the cloud.
A cloud migration strategy is essentially a cloud migration project plan, a high-level plan in which organizations define why and how they will move their on-premises applications to the cloud, either entirely or just for specific workloads. Most strategies involve an appropriate public cloud migration to GCP, AWS or Azure.
As with all plans, migrating to the cloud will most likely present challenges, problems, or delays. Here are some of the top cloud migration challenges you can expect:
- Not having a clear end state. Most companies want to move to the cloud, but it doesn’t work that way. Realistically, you should define an end state of your cloud migration to know when certain milestones have been reached.
- Security concerns. With the shared responsibility model, the cloud should be secured through stateless transactions with Zero Trust. While this isn’t always the case, you can expose your operations to unwanted security vulnerabilities.
- Governance and compliance. Every region is different, as are their regulations. You should review which laws apply to you and see how cloud service providers can help you meet and ensure compliance with these regulatory requirements.
- Costs. Costs can easily get out of control when migrating to the cloud, so make sure your workloads migrate successfully without redundant replication.
Migrate to the cloud successfully
Every company should have a cloud migration strategy for the next 10 years, to put it mildly. Recent global events and health crises provide an even clearer picture of why moving workloads to the cloud is a necessary and evolutionary step to meet today’s business demands.
Now that employees and workstations are fully moved to remote locations, on-premises applications are becoming increasingly obsolete and legacy code is difficult for internal IT staff to maintain. Plus, it’s likely to cost you a lot more than migrating to the cloud.
At Luneba Solutions, we have helped countless clients successfully migrate to the cloud, always paying close attention to their individual needs and business scenarios to take concrete and intelligent steps towards the right cloud solution.
With a lot of hype surrounding the cloud, our experts can help you navigate through the fog and develop a solid but simple cloud migration strategy to make your migration smooth and successful.
If you would like to learn more about how we can assist you with your cloud migration, please contact our representatives.