By moving to the cloud, your business can benefit from innovation, better performance, enhanced user experience and substantial cost savings. But it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. We’ll discuss what makes up a successful cloud migration strategy, best practices, challenges, and types of cloud migration strategies you can consider.
What is a Cloud Migration Strategy?
A cloud migration strategy is the process to move digital assets, applications, and services from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud computing environment.
A cloud migration strategy can assist your organisation make the transition when it’s time to migrate from on-prem to cloud. This plan should be customized to your specific business and existing IT infrastructure and take into consideration any dependencies or risks minimizing disruption.
What Are the Benefits of an Effective Cloud Migration Strategy?
An effective strategy can allow your organization to reap the rewards of cloud migration in spectacular proportions. These include:
Lower expenses: The expenses of hardware, software, and IT staff in on-premises data centers can quickly mount up. With a cloud migration plan, you can reduce all of these costs, particularly with effective cost optimization strategies.
Scalability: It’s difficult to achieve scalability with on-prem infrastructure. Switching to a public cloud service can enable your business to scale resources up or down as per the requirement.
Performance: Legacy systems may have an impact on performance. Cloud computing will allow organizations to benefit from the latest technology and more modern equipment. This results in improved performance and reliability.
Compliance: Cloud service providers like major players meet the standards of compliance like HIPAA, GDPR, etc. When businesses move their workloads to the cloud, they can depend on them to ensure proper data protection, compliance, and steer clear of fines from the regulators.
Agility: When it comes to the market changing, a business can become more agile and responsive by moving to a more flexible, cloud-based infrastructure. This cloud agility can lead to quicker innovation.
Security: Security management can be a full-time job. But in-house IT teams are usually tied up in other day-to-day activities. With cloud migration, you can also reduce the strain on your workforce by utilizing cloud-native security solutions, along with those of the security provider securing your underlying infrastructure.
Disaster recovery: A public cloud solution can offer a backup data storage location, expand your disaster recovery capabilities.
What is the value of a Cloud Migration Strategy?
The situation you face as a business will be different from everyone else. Having a personalized cloud migration plan and sticking to it will help you steer clear of trouble on your cloud journey. If you don’t have a proper plan, you may end up with needless downtime or problems that can have financial, productivity and trust implications to your organization.
What are the 7 strategies of cloud migration?
The seven types of cloud migration, often referred to as the seven Rs of cloud migration, are: rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, relocate, retain, and retire. When you’re working with your internal IT team or a cloud migration expert, you’ll have to choose which is the best way for your organization to go:
Rehost (Lift and Shift): A lift and shift approach is when workloads are moved to the cloud without changes. The speed of this is the best, but some workloads might not function in the cloud as they do on-premise and may cause parts of it not to work, or to work incorrectly.
Replatform: If you switch to replatform, your applications will be primarily the same architecture and code as they are in on-premises frameworks. Now, however, there are minor changes to make to go to a cloud service like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS). This can work great when you’re able to make minimal changes to the applications to move them to a cloud environment.
Refactoring: A slightly more time consuming option is refactoring – where more significant changes are made to the existing workloads to enable them to run more effectively in the cloud. Refactoring may consist of the reorganisation of some data, the rewriting of code and/or a change of the configuration of some applications.
Re-purchase: In re-purchasing, companies tend to opt for Software as a Service (SaaS). This could look like moving an on-premises practice management system to a cloud-hosted ERP or CRM.
Relocate: Relocating is “hypervisor-level lift and shift” that involves migrating a collection of servers from an on-premises platform to a cloud version of the same platform.
Rewrite: There are some legacy applications which may need to be completely rebuilt for the cloud environment. When your business doesn’t have the resources to build from scratch, or even refactor, keeping applications and workloads in their current environment could be a good option for the time being.
Retire: In migration, there may be applications that no longer need to be carried across from the source environment, and can be deleted.
Selecting the appropriate cloud migration method.
While any of the migration approaches mentioned above could be successful, the three most popular are: rehosting, replatforming, and refactoring.
Rehosting, involving few or no changes to the code. Your applications only need to be deployed on a cloud version of its operating system, which will reduce initial investment and the transition time. But this can result in expensive technical debt and lack of cloud optimization.
Replatforming is the process of adapting applications to the platform of the cloud. This can involve targeted changes to the code to make use of some common cloud services, such as load balancing, but doesn’t require extensive changes. This can solve short-term infrastructure problems, and provide better performance and cost-effectiveness.
Refactoring (rearchitecting) means re-writing and packaging applications to be able to communicate with all cloud services. For example, Microsoft Azure cloud services also include content delivery, disaster recovery, mobile development tools, digital rights protection and AI services, among other things, to build AI-based applications. It can be suitable for a migration project for legacy applications that seeks to future-proof IT systems and to make it easier to maintain.
13 Best Practices for a Successful Cloud Migration Strategy
The first step to a seamless transition is to determine the type of cloud migration that works best for your business needs. However, careful planning, monitoring, testing and optimization are essential to a successful migration.
1. Assess the Current Environment
The first step is to have a cloud readiness assessment that will help you review what you have in place, along with your company’s objectives and plans for the migration. This will include:
- A record of your business’s software, hardware, data storage, security systems, cloud platforms, and IT staff skills.
- An assessment of your organization’s existing IT requirements and goals.
- The security needs of cloud/non-cloud applications, the expected workload, and the interdependencies between applications.
It will significantly minimise issues during the migration process, if you have a clear understanding of your organisation’s IT assets, resources and goals. As part of this evaluation, it is important to identify optimal workloads and/or applications to migrate and to assess the level of risk associated with each. This will aid in prioritization in the development of your detailed plan.
There are a number of managed services providers that provide pre-migration assessments, which provide expert insights. For instance, TierPoint’s hybrid cloud consulting services provide customers with a personalized cloud roadmap, an estimated total cost of ownership (TCO) and ROI, and a phased migration plan that considers their IT dependencies.
2. Define your migration objectives and KPIs
What are you looking to get out of cloud migration? Looking to boost response time for remote users or cut down on your IT operating expenses?
Clear objectives and specific key performance indicators (KPIs) will make it easier to track the success of the migration. Keeping track of the KPIs can also be beneficial to demonstrate to upper management the need for cloud migration and to get their buy-in and support for the project.
These are some measures that can be adopted to measure migration progress:
- Network throughput
- Network latency
- Error rates
- Memory usage rates
- CPU usage
- Storage costs
- Monthly downtime
The key is to select metrics that are most important to your business and best illustrate the need for, and value of, cloud adoption.
3. Choose the right cloud provider and cloud model
IT environments are complex and there is no one size fits all cloud deployment model or environment. Choosing cloud models and providers appropriately is an important part of an effective cloud migration strategy.
Cloud can be deployed in four basic types: public, private, hybrid or multicloud. Hybrid environments can combine cloud and non-cloud infrastructure, providing flexibility and control, while multicloud environments utilize multiple clouds for better performance, cost, and resiliency.
When deciding on a cloud environment and model of deployment, an IT manager may consider factors such as regulatory requirements, licensing issues, scalability, accessibility for distributed workers, the computing needs of the workloads, and the need to keep existing investments in hardware or software.
4. Develop a Migration Business Case
Create a cloud migration business case, detailing the benefits and costs of moving to the cloud. Pay attention to features like greater agility, enhanced security, and savings when converting. The business case is also the place to review the technical feasibility of the migration project, risks of migration and all the factors that are prompting the migration at this time.
Be realistic about the actual costs that are likely to be faced to avoid a mismatch between strategy and implementation; and be clear in the business case about the recommendations.
5. Perform Cost Analysis
Each of the top cloud providers has a cloud calculator that can help you flesh out your business case and strategy. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform each offer tools that enable you to work out the cost of using their platforms and different cloud services, including the AWS Pricing Calculator and Azure Pricing Calculator.
Be specific when determining your cloud “TCO” and how it will compare to your current “on premise” TCO.
6. Ensure Data Interoperability
One of the cloud migration difficulties may be data compatibility. Data format variations can introduce delays, corruption or loss of information during data transfer.
Standardizing data formats and protocols is key to a successful transition. Data transfer should be made easier between cloud providers even after you’ve moved. An approach that is cloud agnostic can be useful in helping to avoid vendor lock-in if you want to switch to another vendor later. A first step is to choose a cloud provider and migration tools that are portable.
7. Roll out Your Migration in Phases
By taking a phased approach, organizations can minimize risks, ensure business continuity, and adjust to the process. Don’t try to do too much at one time with a “big bang,” you can do it in stages so that you can spot and solve problems before they affect critical systems.
One of the elements of such a phased strategy is to establish a migration timeline and also identify key milestones – prioritise low-risk workloads that would gain most from the migration.
8. Monitor Performance
Prior to migration, set an application performance baseline. This can assist you to spot any changes after migrating to cloud, if desired.
There are several monitoring tools to gather application performance data. At least, track the metrics that are relevant to your business, such as error rates, response time or throughput. As you go, you will make adjustments to your applications and/or infrastructure to enhance performance.
With continuous monitoring you can also boost the visibility of your cloud and discover bottlenecks and opportunities for optimization. It can identify issues that arise after migration in a timely manner. Monitoring also can be used to identify if there are any potential vulnerabilities or threats that could escalate into larger issues over time if not detected.
9. Prepare a Disaster Recovery Plan
Performing a cloud migration can be hugely beneficial for disaster recovery. It’s typically much easier to duplicate workloads and have a failover site in the event of a disaster when hosting with a public cloud provider. However, it is essential to have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that spells out actions to take in the event of disaster, designates specific roles to individuals, and outlines the communications system to inform both internal and external stakeholders.
10. Validate and Strengthen Cloud Security
Part of disaster recovery and business continuity is validating and building your cloud security posture. You should have a strategy that:
- Records your current security policies, technologies, and procedures
- Helps you to understand the risks associated with the cloud
- Establishes an implementation plan for security controls in the cloud
- Describes how you will monitor and notify your organization if threats are discovered
11. Assure Compliance
Oftentimes, compliance is easy to achieve with public cloud providers. There are many vendors who offer basic compliance. Some AWS services, for instance, are compliant with HIPAA/HITECH, GDPR, NIST 800-171, and PCI-DSS compliance. If your organisation has to adhere to compliance measures that are less prevalent, however, you might need to collaborate with the cloud service provider and external experts to ensure that you can comply to the required levels in this new environment.
12. Maximize Applications, Cloud Usage and Costs
It’s easier to say than do to optimize without compromising. But optimizing workloads and applications in the cloud requires revisiting code and/or re-building, to improve the productivity and user experience. If you’re not optimizing properly, then you could be taking compromises to the quality of your migration. A cloud migration strategy needs to balance the benefits of optimizing in the cloud with the amount of work that will go into these efforts.
Another aspect to bolstering your cloud adoption plan is to have a good sense of your costs. Conducting a thorough cloud cost analysis that analyzes your cloud usage and pricing plans, then continuing to do so on a regular basis, can help you control your budget and increase cloud ROI.
Get a Free Cloud Cost Analysis
13. Plan for Ongoing Management and Continuous Improvement
When planning a cloud migration project, it’s crucial to build in the flexibility for managing and maintaining your enterprise in the cloud to minimize the likelihood of issues. It is an important precaution to take to prevent unexpected downtimes and maintain optimal performance as cloud technologies and business requirements change.
Cloud Migration Strategy Tools
Along with the cloud cost pricing tools listed above, there are a multitude of cloud migration tools out there that can help you assess and understand which metrics to use to determine success in your environment like:
AWS Assessment Tool: A model to help end-to-end visibility into an organization’s cloud journey and gain insights into gaps, strengths, and weaknesses.
Azure Migrate: A tool for assessment that delves into on-premises resources and offers end-to-end tracking and insights in the tool’s interface.
- A tool called Cloudockit for documenting cloud environments and creating technical diagrams or drawings for business.
- What are the common challenges you might face while migrating your business to the cloud?
- Although each project will be individual, there are some common issues that businesses may face when migrating to the cloud.
Lack of Strategy: This one, again, shouldn’t be surprising, but a hasty cloud migration can prove to be a bad move if it’s not done strategically. Spending time in the beginning to find the issues you may encounter during cloud migration will save you a lot of pain.
Cost Management: Without a good grasp of the costs and complex pricing models of cloud migration, it’s easy to spend too much money. Fortunately, if you are able to solve the first challenge, the second might go away too.
Within your strategy (and throughout the actual cloud migration), make sure that you are documenting and analyzing the cost of software and hardware development, cloud hosting, the cost of transitioning from the previous software and hardware, and the cost of internal and external labor for the transition project. Cloud monitoring tools are useful for efficiently tracking the usage of resources and applications after migrating them to the cloud, and optimising cloud costs based on the information captured.
Compatibility
One of the significant challenges is to guarantee compatibility between apps and the target cloud model. Legacy applications or custom-built applications might have been built on a given operating system or network architecture and may have special requirements that can impact its performance in the cloud.
When planning a migration, it is crucial to understand and resolve the application dependencies and verify the integration of cloud-native services. If not, before the move to the cloud, it can cause poor performance and overall application failure, which can negatively impact business operations, user experience, etc.
Vendor Lock-in
Developing an application to work with a particular vendor may cause problems later on if you want to move to a different public cloud provider. This can be prevented with the help of vendor-agnostic resources. If there are specific characteristics that you will be stuck with the vendor, look for other ways in which you may have leverage if you need it.
Security and Compliance
While cloud migration can raise new security issues, the participation of big cloud providers and the involvement of experts in the field of cybersecurity in planning and implementation can ensure that security doesn’t become a problem. Data encryption, vulnerability scanning, access control, security monitoring, and compliance with all regulations are factors to consider in a cloud migration strategy.
Migration Implementation
The complexities associated with the actual migration in itself can be enormous. A few of the difficult factors that must be taken into account are:
By moving to the cloud, your business can benefit from innovation, better performance, enhanced user experience and substantial cost savings. But it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. We’ll discuss what makes up a successful cloud migration strategy, best practices, challenges, and types of cloud migration strategies you can consider.
What is a Cloud Migration Strategy?
Cloud migration strategy is the process to move digital assets, applications, and services from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud computing environment.
A cloud migration strategy can assist your organisation make the transition when it’s time to migrate from on-prem to cloud. This plan should be customized to your specific business and existing IT infrastructure and take into consideration any dependencies or risks minimizing disruption.
What Are the Benefits of an Effective Cloud Migration Strategy?
An effective strategy can allow your organization to reap the rewards of cloud migration in spectacular proportions. These include:
Lower expenses: The expenses of hardware, software, and IT staff in on-premises data centers can quickly mount up. With a cloud migration plan, you can reduce all of these costs, particularly with effective cost optimization strategies.
Scalability: It’s difficult to achieve scalability with on-prem infrastructure. Switching to a public cloud service can enable your business to scale resources up or down as per the requirement.
Performance: Legacy systems may have an impact on performance. Cloud computing will allow organizations to benefit from the latest technology and more modern equipment. This results in improved performance and reliability.
Compliance: Cloud service providers like major players meet the standards of compliance like HIPAA, GDPR, etc. When businesses move their workloads to the cloud, they can depend on them to ensure proper data protection, compliance, and steer clear of fines from the regulators.
Agility: When it comes to the market changing, a business can become more agile and responsive by moving to a more flexible, cloud-based infrastructure. This cloud agility can lead to quicker innovation.
Security: Security management can be a full-time job. But in-house IT teams are usually tied up in other day-to-day activities. With cloud migration, you can also reduce the strain on your workforce by utilizing cloud-native security solutions, along with those of the security provider securing your underlying infrastructure.
Disaster recovery: A public cloud solution can offer a backup data storage location, expand your disaster recovery capabilities.
What is the value of a Cloud Migration Strategy?
The situation you face as a business will be different from everyone else. Having a personalized cloud migration plan and sticking to it will help you steer clear of trouble on your cloud journey. If you don’t have a proper plan, you may end up with needless downtime or problems that can have financial, productivity and trust implications to your organization.
What are the 7 strategies of cloud migration?
The seven types of cloud migration, often referred to as the seven Rs of cloud migration, are: rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, relocate, retain, and retire. When you’re working with your internal IT team or a cloud migration expert, you’ll have to choose which is the best way for your organization to go:
- Rehost (Lift and Shift): A lift and shift approach is when workloads are moved to the cloud without changes. The speed of this is the best, but some workloads might not function in the cloud as they do on-premise and may cause parts of it not to work, or to work incorrectly.
- Replatform: If you switch to replatform, your applications will be primarily the same architecture and code as they are in on-premises frameworks. Now, however, there are minor changes to make to go to a cloud service like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS). This can work great when you’re able to make minimal changes to the applications to move them to a cloud environment.
- Refactoring: A slightly more time consuming option is refactoring – where more significant changes are made to the existing workloads to enable them to run more effectively in the cloud. Refactoring may consist of the reorganisation of some data, the rewriting of code and/or a change of the configuration of some applications.
- Re-purchase: In re-purchasing, companies tend to opt for Software as a Service (SaaS). This could look like moving an on-premises practice management system to a cloud-hosted ERP or CRM.
- Relocate: Relocating is “hypervisor-level lift and shift” that involves migrating a collection of servers from an on-premises platform to a cloud version of the same platform.
- Rewrite: There are some legacy applications which may need to be completely rebuilt for the cloud environment. When your business doesn’t have the resources to build from scratch, or even refactor, keeping applications and workloads in their current environment could be a good option for the time being.
- Retire: In migration, there may be applications that no longer need to be carried across from the source environment, and can be deleted.
Selecting the appropriate cloud migration method.
While any of the migration approaches mentioned above could be successful, the three most popular are: rehosting, replatforming, and refactoring.
Rehosting, involving few or no changes to the code. Your applications only need to be deployed on a cloud version of its operating system, which will reduce initial investment and the transition time. But this can result in expensive technical debt and lack of cloud optimization.
Replatforming is the process of adapting applications to the platform of the cloud. This can involve targeted changes to the code to make use of some common cloud services, such as load balancing, but doesn’t require extensive changes. This can solve short-term infrastructure problems, and provide better performance and cost-effectiveness.
Refactoring (rearchitecting) means re-writing and packaging applications to be able to communicate with all cloud services. For example, Microsoft Azure cloud services also include content delivery, disaster recovery, mobile development tools, digital rights protection and AI services, among other things, to build AI-based applications. It can be suitable for a migration project for legacy applications that seeks to future-proof IT systems and to make it easier to maintain.
13 Best Practices for a Successful Cloud Migration Strategy
The first step to a seamless transition is to determine the type of cloud migration that works best for your business needs. However, careful planning, monitoring, testing and optimization are essential to a successful migration.
1. Assess the Current Environment
The first step is to have a cloud readiness assessment that will help you review what you have in place, along with your company’s objectives and plans for the migration. This will include:
- A record of your business’s software, hardware, data storage, security systems, cloud platforms and IT staff skills.
- An assessment of your organization’s existing IT requirements and goals.
- The security needs of cloud/non-cloud applications, the expected workload, and the interdependencies between applications.
It will significantly minimise issues during the migration process, if you have a clear understanding of your organisation’s IT assets, resources and goals. As part of this evaluation, it is important to identify optimal workloads and/or applications to migrate and to assess the level of risk associated with each. This will aid in prioritization in the development of your detailed plan.
There are a number of managed services providers that provide pre-migration assessments, which provide expert insights. For instance, TierPoint’s hybrid cloud consulting services provide customers with a personalized cloud roadmap, an estimated total cost of ownership (TCO) and ROI, and a phased migration plan that considers their IT dependencies.
2. Define your migration objectives and KPIs
What are you looking to get out of cloud migration? Looking to boost response time for remote users or cut down on your IT operating expenses?
Clear objectives and specific key performance indicators (KPIs) will make it easier to track the success of the migration. Keeping track of the KPIs can also be beneficial to demonstrate to upper management the need for cloud migration and to get their buy-in and support for the project.
These are some measures that can be adopted to measure migration progress:
- Network throughput
- Network latency
- Error rates
- Memory usage rates
- CPU usage
- Storage costs
- Monthly downtime
The key is to select metrics that are most important to your business and best illustrate the need for, and value of, cloud adoption.
3. Choose the right cloud provider and cloud model
IT environments are complex and there is no one size fits all cloud deployment model or environment. Choosing cloud models and providers appropriately is an important part of an effective cloud migration strategy.
Cloud can be deployed in four basic types: public, private, hybrid or multicloud. Hybrid environments can combine cloud and non-cloud infrastructure, providing flexibility and control, while multicloud environments utilize multiple clouds for better performance, cost, and resiliency.
When deciding on a cloud environment and model of deployment, an IT manager may consider factors such as regulatory requirements, licensing issues, scalability, accessibility for distributed workers, the computing needs of the workloads, and the need to keep existing investments in hardware or software.
4. Develop a Migration Business Case
Create a cloud migration business case, detailing the benefits and costs of moving to the cloud. Pay attention to features like greater agility, enhanced security, and savings when converting. The business case is also the place to review the technical feasibility of the migration project, risks of migration and all the factors that are prompting the migration at this time.
Be realistic about the actual costs that are likely to be faced to avoid a mismatch between strategy and implementation; and be clear in the business case about the recommendations.
5. Perform Cost Analysis
Each of the top cloud providers has a cloud calculator that can help you flesh out your business case and strategy. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform each offer tools that enable you to work out the cost of using their platforms and different cloud services, including the AWS Pricing Calculator and Azure Pricing Calculator.
Be specific when determining your cloud “TCO” and how it will compare to your current “on premise” TCO.
6. Ensure Data Interoperability
One of the cloud migration difficulties may be data compatibility. Data format variations can introduce delays, corruption or loss of information during data transfer.
Standardizing data formats and protocols is key to a successful transition. Data transfer should be made easier between cloud providers even after you’ve moved. An approach that is cloud agnostic can be useful in helping to avoid vendor lock-in if you want to switch to another vendor later. A first step is to choose a cloud provider and migration tools that are portable.
7. Roll out Your Migration in Phases
By taking a phased approach, organizations can minimize risks, ensure business continuity, and adjust to the process. Don’t try to do too much at one time with a “big bang,” you can do it in stages so that you can spot and solve problems before they affect critical systems.
One of the elements of such a phased strategy is to establish a migration timeline and also identify key milestones – prioritise low-risk workloads that would gain most from the migration.
8. Monitor Performance
Prior to migration, set an application performance baseline. This can assist you to spot any changes after migrating to cloud, if desired.
There are several monitoring tools to gather application performance data. At least, track the metrics that are relevant to your business, such as error rates, response time or throughput. As you go, you will make adjustments to your applications and/or infrastructure to enhance performance.
With continuous monitoring you can also boost the visibility of your cloud and discover bottlenecks and opportunities for optimization. It can identify issues that arise after migration in a timely manner. Monitoring also can be used to identify if there are any potential vulnerabilities or threats that could escalate into larger issues over time if not detected.
9. Prepare a Disaster Recovery Plan
Performing a cloud migration can be hugely beneficial for disaster recovery. It’s typically much easier to duplicate workloads and have a failover site in the event of a disaster when hosting with a public cloud provider. However, it is essential to have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that spells out actions to take in the event of disaster, designates specific roles to individuals, and outlines the communications system to inform both internal and external stakeholders.
10. Validate and Strengthen Cloud Security
Part of disaster recovery and business continuity is validating and building your cloud security posture. You should have a strategy that:
- Records your current security policies, technologies, and procedures
- Helps you to understand the risks associated with the cloud
- Establishes an implementation plan for security controls in the cloud
- Describes how you will monitor and notify your organization if threats are discovered
11. Assure Compliance
Oftentimes, compliance is easy to achieve with public cloud providers. There are many vendors who offer basic compliance. Some AWS services, for instance, are compliant with HIPAA/HITECH, GDPR, NIST 800-171, and PCI-DSS compliance. If your organisation has to adhere to compliance measures that are less prevalent, however, you might need to collaborate with the cloud service provider and external experts to ensure that you can comply to the required levels in this new environment.
12. Maximize Applications, Cloud Usage and Costs
It’s easier to say than do to optimize without compromising. But optimizing workloads and applications in the cloud requires revisiting code and/or re-building, to improve the productivity and user experience. If you’re not optimizing properly, then you could be taking compromises to the quality of your migration. A cloud migration strategy needs to balance the benefits of optimizing in the cloud with the amount of work that will go into these efforts.
Another aspect to bolstering your cloud adoption plan is to have a good sense of your costs. Conducting a thorough cloud cost analysis that analyzes your cloud usage and pricing plans, then continuing to do so on a regular basis, can help you control your budget and increase cloud ROI.
Get a Free Cloud Cost Analysis
13. Plan for Ongoing Management and Continuous Improvement
When planning a cloud migration project, it’s crucial to build in the flexibility for managing and maintaining your enterprise in the cloud to minimize the likelihood of issues. It is an important precaution to take to prevent unexpected downtimes and maintain optimal performance as cloud technologies and business requirements change.
Cloud Migration Strategy Tools
Along with the cloud cost pricing tools listed above, there are a multitude of cloud migration tools out there that can help you assess and understand which metrics to use to determine success in your environment like:
AWS Assessment Tool: A model to help end-to-end visibility into an organization’s cloud journey and gain insights into gaps, strengths, and weaknesses.
Azure Migrate: A tool for assessment that delves into on-premises resources and offers end-to-end tracking and insights in the tool’s interface.
- A tool called Cloudockit for documenting cloud environments and creating technical diagrams or drawings for business.
- What are the common challenges you might face while migrating your business to the cloud?
- Although each project will be individual, there are some common issues that businesses may face when migrating to the cloud.
Lack of Strategy: This one, again, shouldn’t be surprising, but a hasty cloud migration can prove to be a bad move if it’s not done strategically. Spending time in the beginning to find the issues you may encounter during cloud migration will save you a lot of pain.
Cost Management: Without a good grasp of the costs and complex pricing models of cloud migration, it’s easy to spend too much money. Fortunately, if you are able to solve the first challenge, the second might go away too.
Within your strategy (and throughout the actual cloud migration), make sure that you are documenting and analyzing the cost of software and hardware development, cloud hosting, the cost of transitioning from the previous software and hardware, and the cost of internal and external labor for the transition project. Cloud monitoring tools are useful for efficiently tracking the usage of resources and applications after migrating them to the cloud, and optimising cloud costs based on the information captured.
Compatibility
One of the significant challenges is to guarantee compatibility between apps and the target cloud model. Legacy applications or custom-built applications might have been built on a given operating system or network architecture and may have special requirements that can impact its performance in the cloud.
When planning a migration, it is crucial to understand and resolve the application dependencies and verify the integration of cloud-native services. If not, before the move to the cloud, it can cause poor performance and overall application failure, which can negatively impact business operations, user experience, etc.
Vendor Lock-in
Developing an application to work with a particular vendor may cause problems later on if you want to move to a different public cloud provider. This can be prevented with the help of vendor-agnostic resources. If there are specific characteristics that you will be stuck with the vendor, look for other ways in which you may have leverage if you need it.
Security and Compliance
While cloud migration can raise new security issues, the participation of big cloud providers and the involvement of experts in the field of cybersecurity in planning and implementation can ensure that security doesn’t become a problem. Data encryption, vulnerability scanning, access control, security monitoring, and compliance with all regulations are factors to consider in a cloud migration strategy.
Migration Implementation
The complexities associated with the actual migration in itself can be enormous. A few of the difficult factors that must be taken into account are:
- Complex dependencies and interactions among various systems and infrastructure: A significant amount of understanding is required to migrate preexisting infrastructure and data.
- Security in the cloud: Security is, as mentioned above, a different ballgame in the cloud than in the traditional world. An effective migration strategy will require a robust security plan for data protection and security to prevent unauthorized access, security breaches, a human error, and sensitive data from being compromised.
- Scheduled downtime: Migrations need to be tested and maintained which can impact operations, revenue generation, and user experience, and there will be a scheduled downtime during the migration.
Accelerate Your Cloud Migration Strategy with Expert Support
Looking to continue your cloud migration journey? A successful cloud migration is not a simple transfer of data; it’s about the entire experience.At TierPoint, we know that a successful cloud migration involves more than just moving data; it’s about the entire experience. We assist you in creating a custom strategy to evolve your IT landscape and accelerate growth and innovation.
Whether you’re looking to enhance operational efficiency, improve scalability, or ensure robust security, our expert team is here to support you every step of the way. Save the day for a more agile and resilient IT environment.
