Cloud adoption catalyzed change within the IT and the entire tech industry thanks to its ability to offer users unparalleled, secure access to data and apps from virtually anywhere in the world. Many businesses understandably want to make the leap into the cloud from their current physical or on-premises infrastructures but don’t have a cloud migration strategy to get started.
Thankfully, finding and customizing the right cloud platform helps make this process more manageable.
Many companies fail in these initiatives because they don’t map out a successful cloud migration strategy or fail to invest in the right cloud infrastructure based on their IT assets and company needs. Before getting started with the cloud migration process, companies should understand the necessary steps and tools for making a migration to the cloud as seamless as possible.
Evolution of Cloud Migration
Organizations utilized mainframes via remote terminals before the inception of cloud storage and technologies. Over time, mainframes became more affordable, allowing businesses to put their own on-premise infrastructure into place.
Financial institutes and government agencies were the first to adopt cloud computing services in the form of file storage, accounting systems, ERP, and CRM systems. In the early 2000s, major names in tech like Amazon and Salesforce introduced their own cloud-based services to the general public.
Companies gradually started moving their infrastructure to the cloud using products like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web services, which allowed them to reduce their overall costs and labor efforts—all the while increasing business productivity and efficiency.
In today’s world, many companies offer cloud-hosting services. Businesses across all industries also use or plan to adopt them soon due to the many benefits they offer. Cloud migration is likely the way of the future because it continues to offer organizations flexible and resilient solutions.
In 2011, leading research and advisory company Gartner developed the concept of the R Models in cloud migration strategies. They offered a framework organizations could use to classify their applications better and strategize their migration to the cloud. The initial five R’s consisted of Rehost, Refractor, Revise (or Replatform), Rebuild, and Replace.
Today, companies have the ability to choose from seven cloud migration strategies according to their needs. They include:
- Refactor/Re-architect: This involves transforming an application’s architecture completely by leveraging unique cloud provider features to enhance its agility, scalability, and performance. It is the most expensive migration approach, but the benefits tend to outweigh the potential risks.
- Replatform: This model transfers applications to the cloud and takes advantage of cloud capabilities to optimize them. An example of this is replacing off-the-shelf commercial software with an open-source equivalent.
- Repurchase: This strategy decommissions an existing application and replaces it with an available cloud-based version from the provider’s marketplace.
- Rehost: This involves migrating applications to the cloud without changing them.
- Relocate: Arguably the simplest form of migration, relocating involves completely changing infrastructure without implementing new hardware, rewriting applications, or adjusting operations.
- Retain/Revisit: This strategy involves maintaining applications in their on-premise infrastructure and doesn’t support migration. It is a valid solution for applications with solid investments that still run on legacy mainframe or minicomputer platforms.
- Retire: This includes discontinuing or eliminating obsolete applications and replacing them with cloud-based options.
Why a Considered Cloud Migration Process is Essential
Migrating to the cloud helps companies scale their operations, adapt to the current demands of their markets, and remain competitive in their offerings or services. The cloud has many benefits, like cost-efficiency, improved scalability and flexibility, and enhanced security and compliance.
Cost Efficiency
Although the initial move to the cloud requires a time and money investment, cloud migrations help companies reduce their operational overhead while allowing them to spend less on IT operations.
In addition to relieving companies of the costs associated with running and maintaining in-house physical servers, these companies also gain the ability to decommission cloud-based services when they’re no longer needed to conserve resources.
Scalability and Flexibility
Before cloud-based technologies and storage options, scaling business services in a traditional IT environment to support more demanding workloads meant that companies needed to purchase and install costly additional physical servers, network equipment, software, and more. Cloud-based solutions allow companies to scale their services practically in real-time, thanks to on-demand or even automatic scaling abilities.
Migrating to the cloud allows enterprises to accommodate growing or fluctuating demands within their companies as they change, while also helping teams collaborate on data and apps from any location. This added flexibility and continuity helps companies keep their competitive edge while adjusting resources without unnecessary costs.
Security and Compliance
Traditional in-house tech infrastructures aren’t sufficient when it comes to today’s stringent security and compliance regulations for a variety of industries. Cloud service providers help companies achieve maximum security levels and assured compliance thanks to insightful tools such as enhanced data visibility insights, automated guardrails for data security, centralized identity and access control management, and automatic security updates.
7 Key Steps to a Successful Cloud Migration
Following these steps helps ensure a more successful migration to the cloud.
#1 Understanding the Motivation
Before you move your operations to the cloud, you should understand the advantages of this undertaking. This is critical for explaining the purpose and attaining buy-in from your team. Decision-makers should work alongside their teams to illuminate the benefits, such as cost savings, improved data and app fluidity, more accessible scaling on demand, better security, and more.
Companies should work closely with IT during this phase to determine whether their existing infrastructure is ready to migrate by identifying gaps in tech skills and anticipating costs. Cost calculators can help you add up various expense types to better predict costs, including computing resources, operating systems, storage space, and any specific network needs.
#2 Initial Assessment and Planning
The next step of the process involves further planning and assessment of the company’s needs during and after the migration, including reasonable timelines, milestones, and potential risk areas. Stakeholders and technology teams must work together to create a detailed list of existing assets and their interdependencies while also taking stock of everything moving to the cloud.
This includes data, applications, IT infrastructure, and services. Companies should also make a game plan prioritizing which assets to transfer to the cloud first. They should ensure that they have a support system in place and begin with the least critical assets to test out the system.
#3 Choosing the Right Cloud Provider
The cloud provider market has become saturated. With so many options available, how do you choose the right one?
Weigh factors like cost-effectiveness, reputation and testimonials, services, and scalability. This will help you narrow the search down to the right provider or providers.
While some organizations simply employ the public or the private cloud, others choose a hybrid strategy. A multi-cloud strategy can also be a useful approach— it empowers organizations by hiring various providers to then pick and choose which services to use from each one.
#4 Designing the Migration Blueprint
After deciding on the appropriate engagement model and cloud service provider, business decision-makers and IT specialists should meet with their intended provider to create the most detailed migration plan possible.
Ideally, this plan includes crucial aspects like the preferred cloud architecture, identifying any existing apps needing modifications before or after the migration, and the proper migration method itself, such as a complete shift or a phased migration. This is also the right part of the process for companies to address any security and compliance issues related to the migration and determine factors for governing the process.
#5 Executing the Migration
After meticulous planning and assessments to create a guide map of the process, companies finally see the fruits of their labor by starting the migration. At this point, all teams involved should communicate clearly and continuously and carefully monitor the process to ensure everything goes as planned.
Depending on the components moving to the cloud, companies choose between various cloud migration strategies from the seven R’s. What’s important is that they regularly back up data and consider running parallel environments (old and new) to ensure no data loss or application downtime.
A crucial part of the cloud migration process involves data migration. Businesses should make it a priority to oversee this step and ensure it runs smoothly. If, at any time, data becomes inaccessible to users during a migration, they risk impacting business operations. Companies should transfer each element individually to the cloud and only move to the next one after proving that they work in their new cloud-based environment.
#6 Post-Migration Checks
After transferring every element, companies can consider cloud migration a success once they rigorously test all applications and services and ensure everything works as expected. The best way to do this is by comparing pre and post-migration application performance via established KPIs, ensuring data integrity, and checking for potential security vulnerabilities.
In addition to thoroughly testing the migrated services, apps, and data in the new cloud environment, companies should test for any potential security vulnerabilities or areas requiring additional bolstering. Listening to the comments and findings of end-users also gives organizations further insights into any overlooked issues or areas needing improvement.
#7 Ongoing Management and Optimization
Companies can’t expect to make the move to the cloud without any subsequent adjustments or changes. To successfully use the full breadth of cloud tech, organizations must continuously prioritize making necessary adjustments to keep operations running smoothly and securely. By optimizing things like resource allocation based on usage trends to save costs and scaling storage needs, businesses help make the cloud work better for them instead of vice versa. Organizations must also keep up with their cloud provider’s latest offerings while implementing relevant upgrades to ensure continuous peak performance.
Essential Tools for Cloud Migration
Companies need help from tools before, during, and after migrating to the cloud to make sure they not only successfully migrate their apps, data, and systems but also streamline, protect, and correctly make assessments to improve the process.
Assessment Tools
The first phase of the cloud migration process, assessment, requires companies to thoroughly and holistically look at their existing IT infrastructure to evaluate their existing systems and technologies, approximate costs associated with moving to the cloud, and overall compatibility. To simplify the process, assessment tools analyze both the benefits and risks associated with a potential migration.
Examples of excellent cloud assessment tools include the AWS Migration Evaluator, Google Cloud Migration Assessment, and Microsoft Azure Migrate Assessment and Planning Toolkit.
Migration Tools
Migration tools handle large amounts of data during the migration process to more easily relocate information from existing IT systems to the cloud in a simplified manner. This saves teams enormous amounts of time and stress. In addition to this major assistance, these tools also offer enhanced features like backups, data encryption, and documentation for migration records. Some of the most popular migration tools available on the market include Google Cloud‘s Transfer Service, AWS DataSync, and Azure Site Recovery.
Post-Migration Monitoring & Management Tools
To keep systems running without any hitches, companies must continue monitoring all aspects of their new cloud-based ecosystems for any hiccup, even after a successful migration. Post-migration monitoring and management tools help reduce the bulk of the work associated with this by acting as sentinels of the systems in the cloud.
Google Cloud Operations Suite is a top post-migration tool that offers companies monitoring, logging, and trace-managed services for systems running in the cloud. Other well-known tools include AWS CloudWatch and Azure Monitor.
Security and Compliance Tools
Many companies choose to employ security and compliance tools to ensure that their systems, data storage, and new cloud-based ecosystems remain protected in accordance with all relevant regulatory guidelines. By acting as a holistic watchdog over cloud assets, these tools protect systems and alert the appropriate parties about any malicious cloud-based threats, like network intrusions and server malware. A few of the top security and compliance tools include AWS Config, Azure Security Center, and Google Cloud’s Security Command Center.
Optimization Tools
Continuous optimization is just the name of the game when it comes to utilizing the cloud after a migration. Optimization tools offer companies insights into performance analytics and reporting to help identify areas of their cloud ecosystems in need of further optimization to improve their business workings. Some of the most popular optimization tools include AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management and Billing, and Google Cloud Platform – Cost Management tools.
Common Cloud Migration Challenges and Risks
Although migrating to the cloud offers organizations many benefits, it doesn’t come without challenges and risks as well. The best way to protect against and prevent these problems is through learning about the said risks before ever attempting to migrate. Common cloud migration risks and challenges include:
- Lack of strategy – Trying to jump into a migration to the cloud without a proper strategy opens up a can of catastrophic worms, including devastating data loss and business downtime.
- Cost management – Part of creating a cloud migration plan involves estimating all of the costs associated with the process. Cloud environments remain dynamic with rapidly changing costs surfacing with the advent of new features and services. However, it’s still important to try and estimate future cloud costs using, for instance, cloud cost calculators.
- Vendor lock-in – Vendor lock-in occurs when companies choose to work with a provider and feel forced to continue working with them, regardless of their quality, because changing providers is a lengthy and costly process. While many cloud providers offer many services and keep up with the latest trends, others don’t. To avoid being “locked in” with a potentially lacking provider, companies often work with different providers at the same time.
- Data security and compliance – The migration process presents some security risks. Companies risk significant exposure as they transfer large volumes of sensitive data and configure access controls across environments. At the same time, while cloud providers might offer robust security measures, it’s still the company’s responsibility to secure data and workloads.
- Downtime – The cloud migration process often requires that in-house servers go temporarily offline. Depending on the company’s services, this downtime hinders application performance without proper backup or resource allocation measures.
- Data loss – During the migration process, company data is vulnerable and might be at risk of breach. Companies without proper cloud security protocols to minimize breach risk are susceptible to critical data loss.
- Resource management – A big challenge of cloud migration is ensuring IT employees have the right skills and knowledge to adapt to cloud-based infrastructure. Employees used to managing physical servers must receive proper training to keep up with the company’s transition to cloud-based operations.
- Interoperability – Companies might need help making sure their applications communicate correctly in a new cloud environment. To ensure they do, organizations must assess their applications, select the right cloud migration strategy, and choose the right provider.
Future Trends in Cloud Migration
The rapid evolution of technology offers companies new and exciting trends in cloud migration. We will also see plenty of emerging cloud-native features. With new AI and ML-based technologies, no-code cloud, and edge computing, cloud providers continue simplifying the migration process with improved accuracy.
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning – One of the most promising future trends in cloud migration involves harnessing the power of AI and ML to power cloud computing. Cloud-based AI and ML tools can automate tasks, analyze enormous data sets, and provide real-time actionable insights for more data-driven decisions.
- Low-Code and No-Code Cloud Services – Low-code and no-code cloud services help companies quickly create and deploy applications without investing much. Utilizing this tech will, and already is in many areas, help teams build complex applications without writing code by leveraging drag-and-drop functionalities alongside pre-built templates. This reduces the time and effort required to develop and launch applications, giving companies a significant edge in today’s competitive market.
- Edge Computing – Edge computing moves computer processing and storage to a network’s edge, closest to users, devices, and data sources. When used in cloud migrations, this tech has the potential to reduce latency, improve data privacy, process and analyze data in real time, and improve compliance with data regulations. Using this tech would help organizations keep sensitive data closer to the source to reduce the risk of data breaches.
Conclusion
Moving to the cloud helps organizations thrive in today’s demanding world. From access to systems, data, and apps from nearly anywhere to cost efficiency and scalability on-demand, the cloud offers companies a plethora of benefits and advancements. However, the only way to successfully move from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud is by meticulously creating a cloud migration strategy.
Acting as a blueprint for the entire process, this strategy helps companies recognize possible risk areas while creating a plan for all the “what ifs.” Following just a few key steps helps negate problems by unifying teams, creating a guide map of the flow, and dealing with post-migration needs. While the tech of the future offers the ability to automate and streamline this process much further, existing tools of today already help with vital tasks like security and compliance monitoring and bolstering security in a more automated fashion.
FAQ
What are the immediate benefits of cloud migration?
Cost efficiency, quick scalability, greater flexibility, and improved security and compliance are the immediate benefits.
How do I determine which cloud provider is right for my business?
Determining the right cloud provider starts with the company evaluating its internal needs, then assessing potential providers based on their costs, offered services, cloud models, and future plans.
Is it possible to migrate only parts of my infrastructure to the cloud?
Yes, a hybrid cloud combines public and on-premises cloud services for seamless interoperability.
What are the costs associated with implementing a cloud migration strategy?
The costs associated with cloud migration depend on the amount of data and required storage, systems, servers, and other aspects moving to the cloud. Companies that want a more accurate estimate of the costs associated with their cloud migration strategy should use a cloud cost calculator.
