A cloud migration strategy is the plan of an organization to move existing and co-located applications. They also move their workloads and associated data into the cloud. Most plans include various strategies, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or other public cloud providers. Not all workloads are suitable for cloud migration. But many can benefit from it.
Every organization is different in its particular needs and to achieve the desired business and technical outcomes. It requires knowledge of the business goals and the application portfolio. Application portfolio can provide visibility into the TCO and ROI of bond migration.
What is a Cloud Migration Strategy?
A strategy for cloud migration means moving our applications to a new, cloud-native product, most commonly a SaaS platform (for example, moving a CRM to Salesforce). It includes moving data applications to another business element in a cloud computing environment. The migration strategy of the cloud is the plan for organizations to move existing applications and associated data into the cloud.
A successful cloud migration strategy will involve prioritizing workloads for migration. It is determining the correct migration plan for each workload. Migration strategy adjusts the plan and the results of the pilot. It helps identify and execute the fastest, lowest cost, and least troublemaking from a cloud. Furthermore, we can find which cloud is the right destination for which application. An operation of this strategy will include a combination of these approaches to address the entire application in a portfolio.
Also Read: Direct Method to Backup Google Drive to External Hard Drive
7R’s of Cloud Migration
Data evaluates against the seven common Cloud Migration Strategies (7 Rs) for moving applications to the AWS Cloud. These strategies are refactoring, re-platforming, repurchasing, rehosting, relocating, retaining, and retiring.
Here, we will discuss various types of cloud migration strategies.
Rehost:( Lift & Shift) Rehosting involves lifting part of the entire application. It is a strategy of rehosting applications to AWS without making any changes to the on-premise application.
Relocate:(hypervisor-level lift & shift) Relocation is a strategy to move infrastructure to the cloud without purchasing new hardware, rewriting applications, or modifying your existing operations.
Refactor: Refactor is a need to add new features to increase the scalability of the application or boost your business continuity and productivity. The most expensive strategy achieved after the initial migration is via one of the approaches like Rehosting.
Repurchase: Repurchase is when a company migrates to a third-party company. It is the fastest way possible to access the cloud-based SaaS. The company migrates from the existing application form the data, while all about the system is new.
Replatform:(Lift, Tinker & Shift) Replatforming includes a moderate amount of optimization without changing the core architecture of our application. They follow through a VM so the system becomes compatible with new cloud technologies without restructuring systems.
Retain: Retain is a strategy to keep some elements in your on-premise. Elements are not ready to migrate. It is all about focusing on Migrating what makes sense for the business. Some applications may need to remain on-premise for security.
Retire: Retire is to identify the services and the assets that are no longer useful and that will removed. It helps boost our business case and gives attention to maintaining the needful resources.
Factors Affecting Cloud Migration Strategies For Enterprises
Business Goals: The first consideration for any crucial decision is the business goals achieved by it. CIOs should consider how the company will stand to benefit from the migration. A related concern is whether the technologies that enable the cloud are compatible with legacy applications.
Security:- Security is one of the main concerns for any Cloud Migration Strategies. Public cloud providers have stringent security frameworks and best practices to secure data on their cloud. However, it ensures that our cloud service provider has security measures in a single place.
Compliance: It is related to security. We might need to store certain data in a specific region or some data deployed to the cloud. If we pick a file to migrate to the cloud, there are ways to mitigate security and compliance risks. We should discuss the same with our cloud provider or cloud partner.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: For a perfect Business Continuity, we examine our disaster recovery strategy before embarking on our cloud migration. We must know what constitutes an outage and when fiscal penalties should be effective in such a case.
Cost and ROI: Cloud technology is paid as an operating expenditure and requires little or no more flexibility and scalability. In terms of costs, our cloud subscription should cover most of the expenses.
Verification and Support: Cloud Managed Service Providers (MSPs) possess extensive cloud knowledge to validate, migrate, and support your environment. Cloud Management Platform (CMP) to manage and optimize our cloud assets. It will allow us to view the costs incurred and identify usage patterns.
Best Practices for Cloud Migration Strategies
The following section will discuss the cloud migration strategy and best practices to ensure a smooth transition. They belong to the points of cloud migration, planning, and observance to establish the cloud migration.
Assess and prioritize: Try to evaluate first then the applications and workloads can determine their suitability for moving to the cloud. Workloads are prioritized based on their complexity, dependencies, and business value.
Choose the right provider and services: We should select the cloud provider that corresponds to both technical and organizational requirements. Merge all of them into an account by which each provider can track records.
Test thoroughly: Here, the migration process performs thorough functional testing, data migration, and storage process testing. The scalability and adaptable testing ensure a flawless migration process.
Create a dependency mapping: When identifying and understanding the interdependencies among applications, between servers, and other components, It will be according to the IT infrastructure.
Assess data migration strategies: Look at cloud migration strategies such as the following:
- Direct transfer ( bulk transfer)
- Restore and Backup
- Data transfer services provided by the cloud provider
- Checks and Data Integrity
- Duplication techniques and Data compression.
Continuously monitor and optimize: If we want Long-term success, it requires constantly monitoring performance, alerts, analytics, and security to ensure the health and safety of the cloud implementation.
Plan and design: Develop a comprehensive migration to plan and design. The target of cloud architecture is to ensure the best possible outcome from the migration process.
Implement governance and compliance: It will maintain data integrity and meet regulatory requirements. Establish robust governance and compliance frameworks in the cloud.
Security Challenges We Face in Cloud Migration Strategy
Data loss and corruption: Data corruption may sometimes result from file alterations that make the files unusable. When we migrate the data migration, data might get lost. There could be corruption if the transfer is not carried out correctly. Without proper backups, this strategy could lead to marvelous losses.
End-to-End Data Encryption: Data should be encrypted in transit and at rest. However, we should ensure that the correct encryption methods are used. Managing encryption keys can be challenging if these methods are not used.
Financial Cost: Financial concerns touch on almost every cloud migration challenge. There’s the immediate cost to making the cloud migration strategy itself. In addition, the long-term financial risks of low or slow adoption and training after the migration have occurred.
Migration Complexities: Our organization can experience a cloud migration challenge if we underestimate the complications of the project. Some organizations think they can port outcome software to the cloud as it is. It can lead to moment downtime and loss of key functionalities, which translates to unhappy customers and lost productivity.
Network Bandwidth: We can experience database migration to cloud challenges. We don’t specifically define the network bandwidth requirements of cloud-powered applications. Typically, these applications should match or exceed the performance of on-premise deployments. Unless the bandwidth requirements are accurate, the migrated applications will experience latency, resulting in poor user experience and unmet business requirements.
Conclusion
Cloud migration strategy can pose a significant challenge. The more complete the plan and the more challenges we hope, the more simplified the move. We are interested in cloud migration for our enterprise Cloud Solutions Architect. Migration strategy is most evident today in machine learning and artificial intelligence platforms. As enterprises expand their cloud-native technologies, they seek more standard template-driven processes rather than relying on assumptions and a small core of developers and architects.