Cloud Migration best practices
A cloud migration strategy is defined as a plan that an organization formulates to move all the resources in its infrastructures, such as data, services, and applications, to the cloud. It is important to validate the most efficient way to prioritize and migrate applications before going live. A systematic, documented strategy is crucial.
The Cloud Migration Process
1. Planning your migration
The first step to consider before migrating data to the cloud is to determine the use case that the public cloud will serve. It is also important to assess the environment and determine the factors that will govern the migration. A successful enterprise cloud migration strategy will include prioritizing workloads for migration, determining the correct migration plan for each individual workload, developing a pilot, testing, and adjusting the strategy based on the results of the pilot. A cloud migration strategy document should be created to guide teams through the process and facilitate roll-back if necessary.
2. Choose your cloud environment
Now that you have the visibility you need to achieve success, you are ready to decide what kind of cloud model you want to adopt. Whether you choose public cloud, hybrid cloud, private cloud, or multi-cloud (or services like Google, Azure, or AWS) depends on which best serves your current and future needs.
It is also important to have an application performance management solution in place before the entire migration process starts.
3. Migrating your apps and data
Planned accurately, your actual migration should be plain sailing. Still, keep in mind cloud security concerns, such as complying with security policies and planning for data backup and recovery. If your data becomes inaccessible to users during migration, you risk impacting your business operations. The same is true as you continue to sync and update your systems after the initial migration takes place. We need to find a way to Synchronize changes that are made to the source data while the migration is ongoing.
4. Validating Success
We need to validate the success in a low risk test environment. We cannot declare a cloud migration successful without evidence that it works as expected. With a proper APM solution we can check the comparison of pre and post-move performace.
Types of Cloud Migrations
- Rehosting( Lift and Shift) The most general path is rehosting (or lift-and-shift), which implements as it sounds. It holds our application and then drops it into our new hosting platform without changing the architecture and code of the app. Also, it is a general way for enterprises unfamiliar with cloud computing, who profit from the deployment speed without having to waste money or time on planning for enlargement.
- Replatforming: As a variation on the lift and shift, re-platforming involves making a few further adjustments to optimize your landscape for the cloud. Again, the core architecture of applications stays the same. This, too, is a good strategy for conservative organizations that want to build trust in the cloud while achieving benefits like increased system performance.
- Re-Factoring: It means to rebuild our applications from leverage to scratch cloud-native abilities. A potential disadvantage is vendor lock-in as we are re-creating the cloud infrastructure. It is the most expensive and time-consuming route as we may expect. But, it is also future-proof for enterprises that wish to take benefit from more standard cloud features. It covers the most common three approaches for migrating our existing infrastructure.
- Re-Purchasing: It means replacing our existing applications with a new SaaS-based and cloud-native platform (such as a homegrown CRM using Salesforce). The complexity is losing the existing training and code’s familiarity with our team over a new platform. However, the profit is ignoring the cost of the development.
- Retiring: Once you have assessed your application portfolio for cloud readiness, you might find some applications are no longer useful. In this case, simply turn them off. The resulting savings might even boost your business case for applications that are ready for migration.
- Retaining: For some organizations, cloud adoption does not yet make sense. Are you unable to take data off-premises for compliance reasons? Perhaps you are not ready to prioritize an app that was recently upgraded. In this case, plan to revisit cloud computing at a later date. You should only migrate what makes sense for your business.
