Mastering Cloud Migration: Effective Strategies for 2024

Cloud adoption has catalyzed change in IT and across the technology industry, thanks to its ability to provide users with unparalleled, secure access to data and applications from virtually anywhere in the world. Many companies understandably want to make the leap to the cloud from their current physical or on-premises infrastructures, but don't have a cloud migration strategy to begin with.

Fortunately, finding and customizing the right cloud platform helps make this process more manageable.

Many companies fail at these initiatives because they don't map out a successful cloud migration strategy or invest in the right cloud infrastructure based on the company's IT assets and needs. Before beginning the cloud migration process, companies must understand the steps and tools necessary to make cloud migration as simple as possible.

Evolution of cloud migration

Organizations used mainframes through remote terminals before the advent of cloud storage and technologies. Over time, mainframes became more affordable, allowing companies to implement their own on-premises infrastructure.

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, big tech names like Amazon and Salesforce introduced their own cloud-based services to the general public.

Companies have gradually started to migrate their infrastructure to the cloud using products such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web services, which has allowed them to reduce overall costs and labor efforts while increasing business productivity and efficiency.

In today's world, many companies offer cloud hosting services. Businesses across industries also use them or plan to adopt them soon due to the many benefits they offer. Migrating to the cloud is likely the way of the future because it continues to offer organizations flexible and resilient solutions.

In 2011, leading research and consulting firm Gartner developed the concept of R Models in cloud migration strategies . They provided a framework that organizations could use to better classify their applications 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 possibility to choose between seven cloud migration strategies according to their needs. They include:

• Refactor/Rearchitect: This involves completely transforming an application's architecture, leveraging the cloud provider's unique capabilities to improve its agility, scalability, and performance. It is the most expensive migration approach, but the benefits tend to outweigh the potential risks.
• Replatform : This model moves applications to the cloud and leverages cloud resources to optimize them. An example of this is replacing off-the-shelf commercial software with an open source equivalent.
• Buyback : This strategy retires an existing application and replaces it with a cloud-based version available off-the-shelf from the provider.
• Rehost: This involves migrating applications to the cloud without changing them.
• Relocate : Arguably the simplest form of migration, relocation involves completely changing the infrastructure without implementing new hardware, rewriting applications, or adjusting operations.
• Retain/Revisit: This strategy involves maintaining applications on your on-premises infrastructure and does not 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 such as cost-effectiveness, improved scalability and flexibility, and improved security and compliance.

Cost efficiency

While the initial move to the cloud requires an investment of time and money, cloud migrations help businesses reduce their operational expenses, allowing them to spend less on IT operations.

In addition to relieving companies of the costs associated with operating and maintaining in-house physical servers, these companies also gain the ability to decommission cloud-based services when they are 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 additional costly physical servers, networking equipment, software, and more. . Cloud-based solutions allow companies to scale their services in near real-time, thanks to on-demand or even automatic scaling capabilities.

Moving to the cloud allows companies to accommodate growing or fluctuating demands within their enterprises as they change, while also helping teams collaborate on data and applications from any location. This added flexibility and continuity helps companies maintain their competitive advantage while adjusting resources without unnecessary costs.

Security and Compliance

Traditional in-house technology infrastructures are not enough when it comes to today's stringent security and compliance regulations across industries. Cloud service providers help businesses achieve maximum levels of security and assured compliance thanks to insightful tools such as enhanced data visibility insights, automated safeguards for data security, centralized identity management and access control, and automatic security updates. security.

7 Key Steps for a Successful Cloud Migration

Following these steps helps ensure a more successful migration to the cloud.

#1 Understanding Motivation

Before migrating your operations to the cloud, you must understand the advantages of this venture. This is key to explaining the purpose and getting buy-in from your team. Decision makers must work together with their teams to illuminate benefits such as cost savings, greater data and application fluidity, more affordable on-demand scalability, better security, and more.

Companies should work closely with IT during this phase to determine whether their existing infrastructure is ready to migrate, identifying gaps in technology skills and anticipating costs. Cost calculators can help you add up various types of expenses to better predict costs, including computing resources, operating systems, storage space, and any specific networking needs.

#2 Initial Assessment and Planning

The next step in the process involves additional planning and assessment of the company's needs during and after the migration, including reasonable timelines, milestones, and areas of potential risk. Stakeholders and technology teams must work together to create a detailed list of existing assets and their interdependencies, while taking stock of everything moving to the cloud.

This includes data, applications, IT infrastructure and services. Companies must also make a game plan prioritizing which assets to move to the cloud first. They should ensure they have a support system in place and start with the least critical assets to test 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 such as cost-benefit, reputation and testimonials, services and scalability. This will help you narrow your search to the right supplier or suppliers.

While some organizations simply employ public or private cloud, others choose a hybrid strategy. A multi-cloud strategy can also be a useful approach – it empowers organizations to contract with multiple providers and then choose which services to use from each.

#4: Designing the migration plan

After deciding on the appropriate engagement model and cloud service provider, business decision makers and IT experts should meet with the intended provider to create the most detailed migration plan possible.

Ideally, this plan includes crucial aspects such as the preferred cloud architecture, identification of any existing applications that require modifications before or after the migration, and the appropriate migration method itself, such as a complete move or a phased migration. This is also the right part of the process for companies to address any security and compliance issues related to migration and determine the factors to govern the process.

#5 Running the migration

After meticulous planning and assessments to create a road map of the process, companies finally see the fruits of their labor when they begin the migration. At this point, all teams involved must communicate clearly and continuously and carefully monitor the process to ensure everything goes as planned.

Depending on the components that are migrating to the cloud, companies choose between several cloud migration strategies among the seven R's. The important thing is that they back up data regularly and consider running parallel environments (old and new) to ensure there is no data loss or application downtime.

A crucial part of the cloud migration process involves data migration. Companies must prioritize oversight of this step and ensure it runs smoothly. If at any time data becomes inaccessible to users during a migration, it risks impacting business operations. Companies should move each element individually to the cloud and only move on to the next one after they have proven they work in their new cloud-based environment.

#6: Post-Migration Checks

After transferring all elements, companies can consider their cloud migration a success as they rigorously test all applications and services and ensure everything works as expected. The best way to do this is to compare pre- and post-migration application performance against established KPIs, ensuring data integrity and checking for potential security vulnerabilities.

In addition to thoroughly testing the services, applications and data migrated into the new cloud environment, companies should test for any potential security vulnerabilities or areas that require additional hardening. Listening to end-user feedback and conclusions also gives organizations more insight into any overlooked issues or areas in need of improvement.

#7: Ongoing Management and Optimization

Businesses cannot expect to move to the cloud without any subsequent adjustments or changes. To successfully utilize the full breadth of cloud technology, organizations must continually prioritize the adjustments necessary to keep operations running smoothly and securely. By optimizing things like resource allocation based on usage trends to save costs and scale storage needs, companies help make the cloud work better for them, rather than vice versa. Organizations must also keep up with the latest offerings from their cloud providers while implementing relevant updates to ensure continued peak performance.

Essential tools for cloud migration

Businesses need the help of tools before, during and after cloud migration to ensure not only the successful migration of their applications, data and systems, but also to speed up, secure and correctly assess to improve the process.

Assessment Tools

The first phase of the cloud migration process, assessment, requires companies to thoroughly and holistically analyze their existing IT infrastructure to assess their existing systems and technologies, the approximate costs associated with moving to the cloud, and the general 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 the 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 streamlined manner. This saves teams a lot of time and stress. In addition to this important assistance, these tools also offer enhanced features such as backups, data encryption, and documentation for migration logs. Some of the most popular migration tools available on the market include Google Cloud Transfer Service, AWS DataSync, and Azure Site Recovery.

Post-migration monitoring and management tools

To keep systems running smoothly, companies must continue to monitor all aspects of their new cloud-based ecosystems for any issues, even after a successful migration. Post-migration monitoring and management tools help reduce most of the work associated with this by acting as sentinels for cloud systems.

Google Cloud Operations Suite is a cutting-edge post-migration tool that provides businesses with managed monitoring, logging, and tracking services for systems running in the cloud. Other popular 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 to any malicious cloud-based threats, such as network intrusions and server malware. Some 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 provide companies with insights into performance analytics and reporting to help identify areas of their cloud ecosystems that need additional optimization to improve the functioning of their business. Some of the most popular optimization tools include AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management and Billing, and Google Cloud Platform – cost management tools.

Common challenges and risks of migrating to the cloud

While moving to the cloud offers many benefits to organizations, it also brings challenges and risks. The best way to protect yourself and prevent these problems is to learn about these risks before you even try to migrate. Common risks and challenges of moving to the cloud include:

• Lack of strategy – Attempting to migrate to the cloud without a proper strategy opens up a can of catastrophic worms, including devastating data losses and business downtime.
• Cost management – ​​Part of creating a cloud migration plan involves estimating all costs associated with the process. Cloud environments remain dynamic, with rapidly changing costs emerging with the advent of new features and services. However, it is still important to try to estimate future cloud costs using, for example, cloud cost calculators.
• Supplier lock- in – Supplier lock-in occurs when companies choose to work with one supplier and feel forced to continue working with them, regardless of their quality, because changing suppliers is a time-consuming and expensive process. While many cloud providers offer many services and keep up with the latest trends, others do not. To avoid being “locked in” to a potentially non-existent supplier, companies often work with different suppliers 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 between environments. At the same time, while cloud providers may offer robust security measures, it is still the company's responsibility to protect data and workloads.
• Downtime – The cloud migration process often requires internal servers to be temporarily offline. Depending on the company's services, this downtime impairs application performance without adequate backup measures or resource allocation.
• Data loss – During the migration process, company data is vulnerable and may be at risk of breach. Companies without adequate cloud security protocols to minimize the risk of a breach are susceptible to the loss of critical data.
• Resource management – ​​A major challenge of migrating to the cloud is ensuring that IT employees have the appropriate skills and knowledge to adapt to cloud-based infrastructure. Employees accustomed to managing physical servers must receive adequate training to accompany the company's transition to cloud-based operations.
• Interoperability – Companies may need help ensuring their applications communicate correctly in a new cloud environment. To ensure they do, organizations must evaluate their applications, select the right cloud migration strategy, and choose the right vendor.

Future Trends in Cloud Migration

The rapid evolution of technology offers companies new and exciting trends in migrating to the cloud. We will also see many emerging cloud-native capabilities. With new technologies based on AI and ML, codeless cloud, and edge computing, cloud providers continue to simplify the migration process with greater 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 huge 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 businesses quickly build and deploy applications without investing much. Utilizing this technology will, and is already in many areas, help teams build complex applications without writing code, leveraging drag and drop functionality along with pre-built templates. This reduces the time and effort required to develop and launch applications, giving companies a significant advantage in today's competitive market.
• Edge computing – Edge computing moves computer processing and storage to the edge of the network, closer to users, devices and data sources. When used in cloud migrations, this technology has the potential to reduce latency, improve data privacy, process and analyze data in real time, and improve compliance with data regulations. Using this technology would help organizations keep sensitive data closer to the source to reduce the risk of data breaches.

Conclusion

Migrating to the cloud helps organizations thrive in today's demanding world. From accessing systems, data and applications from virtually anywhere to cost efficiency and on-demand scalability, the cloud offers businesses a multitude of benefits and advancements. However, the only way to successfully migrate from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud is to meticulously create a cloud migration strategy.

Acting as a blueprint for the entire process, this strategy helps companies recognize potential areas of risk while creating a plan for all the “what ifs.” Following just a few key steps helps eliminate problems, unify teams, create a flow map, and handle post-migration needs. While future technology offers the ability to automate and streamline this process much more, the tools that exist today already help with vital tasks, such as monitoring security and compliance, and enforcing security in a more automated way.

Common questions

What are the immediate benefits of migrating to the cloud?

Cost efficiency, rapid scalability, greater flexibility, and greater security and compliance are the immediate benefits.

How can I determine which cloud provider is right for my business?

Determining the right cloud provider starts with the company assessing its internal needs and then evaluating potential providers based on their costs, services offered, 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 moving to the cloud depend on the amount of data and storage required, systems, servers, and other aspects of 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.