With the advancement in technology and fast-changing business demands, cloud-based solutions have started turning out to be a more flexible and powerful option for organizations. There is a mass migration underway to adopt cloud infrastructure and avoid the hassles and operational costs of managing infrastructure in-house. Moving IT infrastructure to the cloud has become a business necessity for many organizations. However, cloud adoption is not a straightforward path. The migration of enterprise legacy applications or rehosting the infrastructure from the data center to the cloud can quickly go south if not planned properly.
As per a study report: 41% of enterprise workloads will be run on public cloud platforms by 2021. While companies state cloud migration is pivotal to their business strategies, most struggle in creating a cloud migration project plan.
Thus, it’s time to revamp your cloud migration strategy for better business processes and avoid disruption. Before that, let’s briefly understand what is cloud migration & benefits for migrating on cloud.
What is cloud migration?
Cloud migration refers to the process of moving an organization’s data, applications and other elements into a cloud computing environment. The type of cloud to cloud migration depends on what the organization wants to achieve from digitization. One of the most common models is to transfer data and applications from an on-premise data center to the public cloud. Here’s how an organization typical performs cloud migration with the right set of cloud migration tools:
Today, more and more organizations are moving their data and business processes to the cloud. So let’s start by discussing why they believe cloud migration is critical for their growth.
What are the benefits of cloud migration?
Right from apps and data becoming easily accessible to different teams to making their day-to-day processes more efficient, there are a number of reasons why businesses are moving to the cloud. But here are the ones that make on-premise to cloud migration a definite choice for most:
1. Reduced IT costs: Using resources like public cloud services results in paying as per use. This leads to a dramatic reduction in costs, bringing down the upfront capital expenditure required to implement and maintain on-premise equipment. With the capital and operational expenditures reduce, businesses can invest more in growth strategies and innovations.
2. Digitization of business: AWS cloud migration enables organizations to optimize their business processes and activities for higher efficiency. A well thought through cloud migration strategy can help businesses become more efficient by leveraging a mix of digital technologies.
3. Growth focused: With cloud migration services, you’re moving a lot of your processes to the public cloud. This removes a lot of time-consuming activities in managing your IT infrastructure and platforms from your plate. With more time and resources in hand, you’re able to focus more on business-driven activities like creating value for customers, new innovations and driving more revenue.
4. Agility in business: The only way to last in a competitive industry is to move fast against challenges and tap into market opportunities at the right time. The public cloud provides this agility to businesses with easy infrastructure and resource scalability. Businesses can take on newer projects without having to worry about base-level requirements.
While the benefits are hard to miss, it is important that an organization has the right cloud computing strategy in place. There are certain things that need to be kept in mind when executing a cloud to cloud migration.
What are the best practices to avoid disruption during Cloud migration?
Organizations tend to follow their own cloud migration strategies, based on the resources, technology, and skills available to them. While some of them succeed at implementing the cloud in their processes effectively, others struggle to even migrate their data. That’s why, as advanced AWS cloud service providers, we put together the cloud migration best practices we absolutely swear by.
1. Create a cloud migration strategy :
The very first thing to do in a cloud migration process is to create a strategy. Begin by mapping out your business motives, use cases and reasons for moving to the cloud. Break your cloud migration strategy into phases to reduce risks of disruption and ensure efficiency.
Source: AWS
Here are 6 R’s for Migrating Applications to the Cloud
- Rehosting: This strategy comes into play when there is a large legacy migration scenario. In this case, organizations are looking to scale its migration quickly to meet new business needs. So they choose to simply rehost majority of their applications instead of developing new ones using cloud-native capabilities.
- Replatforming: In this strategy, you’re taking into account your existing architecture of the application and considering making optimizations to drive more benefits out of it. For instance, you could decide to spend less amount of time managing database instances by migrating to a database-as-a-service platform.
- Repurchasing: As the name suggests, this part of the strategy is all about considering moving to a different product altogether during migration. Usually companies can be seen moving to a SaaS platform at this stage.
- Refactoring/ Re-architecting: Use this strategy to fulfil strong business needs. Be it adding new features to an existing application or scaling it to perform better than its existing environment, this is where you strategize how the application will be architected and developed using cloud-native features.
- Retire: This is the strategy where you simply remove the IR portfolio that is no longer in use or can be simply turned off. You need to take into account each functional area who owns the applications to verify their usage. Cutting out waste lessens the surface area you need to secure during the migration, directing the team to focus on resources that matter.
- Retain/ Revisit: As a thumb rule, you should only be migrating applications that are currently being used by your business. If you’re aren’t sure about an application that was recently upgraded or are not inclined to migrate them, you can revisit those later as your IT portfolio changes.
2.Establish a governance framework
Compliance and security are top concerns for organizations moving to the cloud. Creating a governance framework helps you set policy-based rules to prepare for secure cloud adoption in various business processes. The framework takes into account the risks of using third-party services and defines how to use different tools. It also documents the organization structures, roles, responsibilities, objectives, policies, and the decision-making framework.
AWS designed governance at scale framework to conform with an organization’s existing structure and business processes. You can read all about it here.
3. Optimize the cloud network :
Cloud migration takes a lot of your business processes to the public cloud. The network used by the cloud is the public internet, by default. So if your organization is worried about the internet being too slow or not too secure, contact your internet service provider for optimized speed or choose amazon web services cloud migration. They offer a dedicated network connection to its infrastructure.
4. Upskill your team on cloud migration :
Most companies face cloud migration challenges due to a lack of expertise. So when you’re working on the cloud to cloud migration, be sure to train your team too. You could ask your AWS cloud migration service provider for training sessions designed to get different departments up-to-speed with cloud concepts.
5. Ensure software licensing :
When creating your cloud migration strategy, document all enterprise applications and software. Remember to go through their licensing rules with respect to cloud computing services. If you’re unsure, remember to talk to the vendor to see if the licenses you’ve purchased are suitable or can be updated for usage.
Pro tip: Use a software asset management tool. It helps you reduce the risks, costs, and complexities associated with license management in the cloud.
6. Implement automations :
The one thing you need to ensure during cloud migration is to avoid service disruption. Downtime for your business could mean a loss in efficiency and overall revenue. To minimize the risk of downtime, automate repeated patterns in your process wherever possible. It will not just lower the risk of disruption, but also speed up the cloud to cloud migration. There are a number of cloud migration tools that can help you implement these automations while executing the strategy.
7. Monitor usage of cloud services :
According to Forbes, about 35% of cloud budgets get wasted. That’s why when you’re working on the cloud to cloud migration, you need to monitor your usage. Identify running instances across the different cloud migration services you’re making use of and collect logs from the apps, databases, network touchpoints you’re using. Since moving to the public cloud means you’re paying as per your usage, this will help you ensure that your IT requirements are being met on optimized budgets.
Pro tip: Also monitor for industry compliance and security continually.
8. Leverage cloud service provider support :
Executing an AWS cloud migration strategy without any disruptions can be overwhelming. So instead of trying to tackle it all in-house, you can choose to get support from an AWS cloud service provider. They are not just equipped with the right software, but also come with a vast experience in helping similar businesses move to digitization.
Why you should invest in Cloud Migration?
Industry study shows that cloud computing services are expected to reach a whopping $68.4 billion by 2021. Be it public, private, hybrid of a mix of computing models, organizations will be seen using the cloud for different purposes.
To conclude, cloud migration is the need of the hour as businesses target becoming more efficient at processes and agile. But creating an AWS cloud migration strategy and moving through the cloud migration steps, requires the right skills and technology.
That’s where choosing an AWS cloud service provider like Rapyder comes into the picture. As an advanced AWS consulting partner, the team has years of expertise in strategic cloud consulting, DevOps automation, managed services, and security consulting. We don’t just ensure following all the cloud migration best practices but also educating your organization’s employees on how the cloud changes their day-to-day processes for easy adoption.
Read Next : How To Build A Cloud Strategy For Your Company
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