Like a physical move, cloud migration is the process of transferring data, applications, IT processes, and other digital business operations to the cloud from physical data centers, as opposed to packing up and moving boxes. And a cloud migration strategy is the plan that a business devises to switch from an on-premises data center to cloud computing. It is essential to employ a systematic, documented approach, validating the most productive way to prioritize and move applications before officially starting up on the cloud. Although cloud migration necessitates a lot of preparation and work beforehand, the monetary savings and enhanced flexibility tend to be worth the time and effort.
Prior to Cloud Migration
Before migrating to the cloud, a company must define its strategy. When deciding on a migration approach, it is essential to consider business goals, migration triggers, and workload priorities. A business with time-sensitive triggers should migrate to the cloud. Further, an organization with targeted workloads that require consistent backing may benefit from modernizing.
By involving key stakeholders, an enterprise can seamlessly generate an efficient and productive cloud migration-center. The support of a cross-functional team, composed of business owners, finance, and IT associates, can help to promote a smoother, easier, and quicker migration that accomplishes organizational goals. Moreover, engaging a cloud migration partner can help an organization expand its cloud skillset and lessen migration risks. Managed service providers, like SpeelYaal, provide support throughout and following the complete migration process. Businesses can evaluate which SpeelYaal offering is most optimal for their needs with our cloud cost visualization.
And it is also crucial for an enterprise to plan out its migration approach. Organizations can gather insights specifically tailored to them by assessing a particular organization’s applications, databases, and infrastructure in on-premises environments, like accurate-sizing guidance, workload-level cost estimates, and performance metrics. To make a business-geared case for migration, it’s advantageous to calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO). This enables a company to determine and gauge the possible monetary savings of migrating to a cloud platform, comparing the TCO of on-premises deployment with commensurate cloud offerings.
All in all, a holistic migration plan which factors in workload priorities, resources, milestones, timelines, and funding should be developed. A business should then divide its comprehensive plan into smaller migration projects, each with its own grouping of associated workloads.
During Cloud Migration
Once migration has commenced, a company should prepare its staff, working to elevate their cloud skills. It is essential to provide adequate training for all essential personnel, particularly IT and app development teams, regarding emerging cloud technologies, operational tools, and migration tools. This investment in training upfront can help an organization effectively and productively scale its migration efforts, putting success within reach.
Once employees are trained, it’s crucial to establish a landing zone for workloads. “Pre-configured landing zones include networking, identity, management, security, and governance elements that balance agility with organizational standards.” In leveraging landing zone best practices, government issues can be seamlessly averted throughout and in the aftermath of migration.
The next step is to finally adopt the cloud. Migrating and modernizing should occur in groupings of workloads that are manageable for a given organization. And this switch must be performed utilizing automated tools. At this juncture, a business will select the target cloud services that their workloads will be transferred to.
Following Cloud Migration
Long after migration is completed in its entirety, the cloud migration journey continues. Following complete workload migration, app development teams and IT personnel must actively and continuously manage, secure, and control cloud environments. And in the aftermath of cloud migration, an organization may seek out other opportunities for further modernization.
After cloud migration, a business will be empowered to secure and manage its workloads, quickly detecting and responding to threats with advanced threat protection solutions provided by their cloud platform. Full visibility and control will enable an organization to secure itself from threats utilizing cloud-native solutions. And with one, isolated control plane backed by real-time insights and trends, it will be much simpler to manage and monitor workloads across environments. Further, cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions empower enterprises to maintain protection.
Ultimately, an organization is left to manage, control, and cost-optimize its own cloud environments. Free to build and scale apps and workloads rapidly, a business is empowered to initiate and maintain a combination of general and custom policies tailored to their specific needs. And while maintaining control, an organization can remain compliant with government regulations. Moreover, by familiarizing themselves with the offers, tools, and guidance supplied by their cloud provider, an enterprise can easily monitor and control cloud cost, while also boosting efficiency.
Cloud Migration Strategies
“Broadly known as the “six R’s of migration,” these are the six most common approaches”:
- Rehosting – also known as ‘lift and shift,’ entails transporting an exact copy of your on-premises environment to the cloud, without making in-depth modifications for the most rapid ROI. This approach is best suited for companies that lack a long-term strategy for utilizing advanced cloud capabilities.
- Replatforming – a variation on rehosting, calls for several further alterations for cloud optimization while maintaining the central architecture of applications. This approach is best suited to companies looking to build trust in the cloud while taking advantage of a few performance benefits.
- Repurchasing – implies the transport of all applications to a new, cloud-native product — usually a SaaS platform. Although it can be challenging to lose the familiarity of existing code and have your team assimilate to a new platform, this may be the most cost-effective option.
- Refactoring – also known as ‘re-architecturing,’ involves rebuilding all applications from the ground up. Overall, this is the most costly approach, but it also offers the greatest compatibility with subsequent versions.
- Retiring – entails turning off applications that are no longer of use. This approach may make it more advantageous for your business to start cloud migration.
- Retaining – an approach for organizations for which cloud adoption is not yet ideal. This calls for the creation of a plan to reevaluate your business’s fitness for cloud computing in the future.
Advantages of Cloud Migration
The cloud’s elastic infrastructure provides numerous advantages for businesses, each of which may manifest in a slew of ways. The following are just a few of those ways:
- Enhancing agility and scalability
- Improving data security
- Minimizing environmental impact/footprint
- Reducing hosting costs
- Strengthening disaster recovery solutions
Businesses should only migrate to the cloud if it makes sense for them. Evaluate your company’s needs and your on-premises architecture’s current offerings to establish if migration to the cloud would be advantageous.
Visit our website and review our cloud cost calculator today to determine which Thalaam plan is most ideal for your organization!
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