Cloud migration: Strategy, Process, and Challenges

Assess your apps, explore your migration options, and more with our Cloud migration assistants. Check to see that your data migrated as expected, and that everything is working properly and cloud data migration in order. Refer step 6 in ourtesting guidefor tips on what to look out for when reviewing your data. Use site-wide banners inJiraorConfluenceto help alert users of your upcoming migration.

• Find a service provider who has a deep-level of cloud computing knowledge and experience.
• But outages could be disastrous to application performance — and by extension, customer loyalty — if not supported by proper backup or resource allocation.
• The most obvious reason is an inexperienced or unqualified team and/or cloud migration partner being responsible for the migration.
• Consider evaluating them in the planning phase of your migration.
• Though cloud migration benefits are exciting, prior to the migration process, it’s important to be aware of the cloud migration challenges.
• Compile SLAs, dependencies, user needs and compliance and security requirements.
• You’ll sidestep the financial and operational shock of discovering it as an urgent need and encourage better day-to-day data management policies.

Enterprises may see security risks due to application misconfigurations and weak access controls, for example. After carefully following all the steps mentioned above, final execution would be relatively easy. Your migration process will ultimately depend on your applications, data architecture, and complexity. Once you are on with your migration process, you can focus on potential savings with your selected cloud vendor’s most cost-effective offers. Just migrate all your workloads confidently with the recommended best practices, guidelines, and tools available for cost optimization. Experience the increase in agility by taking the most out of the cloud capabilities and scaling your workloads on-demand as per your business requirements.

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. If you cannot foresee yourself using the benefits cloud providers offer, then don’t. On premise deployment has been the solution for ages, and there is no need to push onto new technology if it offers you no benefits. Re-visiting may be all or some of our applications must reside in the house. For example, applications that have unique sensitivity or handle internal processes to an enterprise.

Check the Production Environment

Determine all the Cloud components needed and test them to detect any possible issues during the migration. To avoid this, you might have to adapt your processes to the processes of the cloud provider. While migrating to the cloud, there might be a need to take on-premises servers offline, which can affect customer experience. This is one of the reasons why it’s very important to have a well-defined plan before starting a migration strategy so that you can predict your investment. Migrating to the cloud can be done through different approaches. Never undervalue the difficulty or significance of data migration planning.

They have multiple data centers around the globe aiming to reduce the harmful effects of natural disasters on service delivery. Cloud migration is the process of moving some or all your digital workloads to the cloud. The company’s move to Google Cloud came as part of a shift to a cloud-first strategy.

What is cloud migration? An introduction to moving to the cloud

The goal was to migrate the entirety of the company’s legacy systems to the public cloud. The key to this migration would be a migration platform that could easily transfer data between the existing on-premises data centers and the cloud. Not only was data moving to Google Cloud, but also AWS, so the platform would also need to enable a seamless multicloud experience. Rehosting, or ‘lift and shift,’ involves using infrastructure-as-a-service . You simply redeploy your existing data and applications on the cloud server. This is easy to do and is thus suited for organizations less familiar with cloud environments.

At the same time, keep current and direct contact information for both local IT staff and cloud provider technical support in the event of unexpected problems. Ultimately, the business implements the migration plan and migrates the workload, dependencies and related data to the prepared cloud infrastructure. The cloud migration process doesn’t end with the actual migration.

Many legacy applications in an organization’s network are not optimized for the cloud, so they must be prepared for the transition with tools designed specifically for the task. Currently, you can choose from a multitude of tools in the market, giving you plenty of choices to handle specific aspects of migration. The first step of a cloud migration is determining exactly what benefits your organization wants to receive from the migration. It’s also recommended to create a comprehensive list of the specific applications, data, etc. that you need to be migrated, as well as anything that would be impractical to include in the migration. It’s important to realize that not all applications can be moved to a cloud environment.

It is a decision that involves the IT, tech, business, and finance teams. This influences the company’s cloud migration strategy in terms of which cloud provider to choose from. Security is a critical challenge for any cloud migration strategy.

Step 3—Migration

This could mean that you will need to modify them before they can be moved to the cloud. These are some of the typical scenarios that can benefit from cloud migration. Assess the various advantages and disadvantages of each as they pertain to your goals, and choose the cloud deployment model that most closely adheres to your needs. It is possible to lift and shift assets only when the migrated assets are compatible with the new environment. KPIs are Key Performance Indicators used to gather metrics about your applications to help you measure the performance of your applications as per your expectations.

Work with your migration team to ensure your key pain points are highlighted for future attention. Finalize the migration team, including both technical and business members, and establish activities around communication and training. Schedule a pilot migration, based on your design, in a non-production environment and address any issues that arise during the pilot. Based on the audit and information gathering, categorize your workloads in order of migration complexity.

But infrastructure changes can often disrupt working practices. Ways of transferring code between development teams may shift. And planners should constantly test to ensure a high-quality user experience. Cloud services provide a way to boost business efficiency. Re-hosting and re-platforming move data flow off-site, reducing the load on data centers.

If you have users continuing to work in the Server products after the migration, be sure to remove this setting after your migration is complete. Use your free Cloud migration trial to test your migration, apps, and any configurations you may need. See our documentation on how to reset your site to run multiple tests. Before running your test migration, https://globalcloudteam.com/ review our detailed pre-migration checklist to make sure your data and environment is ready to go. The more data you migrate, the longer and more complex your migration is likely to be, and could affect Cloud performance later on. Use your migration as an opportunity to clean up your Server instance before running your test migration.

This means that it’s oftentimes required to wrap an application in a container. We’re with you through every stage — from selecting which workloads to migrate, to ongoing management and optimization on your new cloud platform. We get to know you and your organization’s unique goals and challenges, and work with you to build a roadmap leading to your optimal business outcomes. This option allows you to migrate portions of your application to the cloud, while leaving other elements in your legacy environment. You may still need to make some backend adjustments to legacy elements, but this approach can help you move your monolithic application piece-by-piece to the cloud. While cloud providers perform security audits and implement stringent security controls, cloud users struggle to manage their own security aspects.

The State of Security Within eCommerce in 2022

To help your team get adjusted, set aside some time to prioritize any post-migration issues, feedback, or questions. Add a few time slots for office hours in the first week after migration to your organization’s calendars, and create a Slack chat room where end users can drop in to ask questions or provide feedback. As part of testing, you may want to install and test the full functionality and migration of any apps that you plan on using in Cloud. Make sure both you and your stakeholders have tested the Cloud functionality and that it suits your teams’ needs.

Another consideration to keep in mind is meeting ongoing performance and availability benchmarks to ensure your RPO and RTO objectives should they change. Employ automated test framework that has a full stack security testing measures to explore any vulnerabilities after the migration. Never use primitive tools or procedures in speed up the process. This could lead to depreciation of plugins, lost instances and so on.

The migration process might require taking in-house servers temporarily offline. But outages could be disastrous to application performance — and by extension, customer loyalty — if not supported by proper backup or resource allocation. Because their business depends on security, cloud providers usually deploy safe patches and other updates faster than any singular company. Operating at scale allows them to hire devoted security experts, which is usually outside of budgets for medium and large businesses. Having a devoted in-house department allows them to ensure security on a higher level than an average business.

Step 6: Prioritize migration components.

This is typically the most complex and demanding migration approach. It fundamentally recreates the workload from scratch in order to function most effectively and efficiently within the cloud provider’s environment. For example, an aging legacy workload might be redesigned and rebuilt using a cloud-native architecture such as microservices. This approach, often referred to as lift and shift, redeploys existing data and applications on cloud storage and compute resources without modifications.

The cloud migration checklist includes:

And continue the process till all your customers have been successfully moved to the cloud-based applications. Evaluate the cost and performance of the migrated workload to ensure that it achieves intended benefits for the business. Once the migration is completed, thoroughly test the workload for both functionality and performance. Collect and evaluate workload metrics, and look for vulnerabilities to mitigate.

In such cases, it makes financial and operational sense to keep these modules on-premise. Understand what data your company holds and why it holds it. Critical and non-critical data must be classified, with data protections relevant to each class. This means moving your applications to a new, cloud-native product, most commonly a SaaS platform .

To help best assess your costs between Server and Cloud, we’ve built pricing tools that provide a comprehensive view and estimation of pricing. In addition to this guide, our free migration demooffers advice, tips, and best practices for each phase, along with live chat Q&A with our migration support team throughout the demo. New Relic is an observability platform that helps you build better software. You can bring in data from any digital source so that you can fully understand how to improve your system. For more on the topic of cloud costs, check out How to Calculate the Cost of a Cloud Migration. Using a bi-directional syncing mechanism between your on-premises and cloud databases.

Azure Storage: Overview and Introduction to the Various Solutions

For each category, determine which metrics are the most important to your business, and which metrics will be most impacted by the migration to the cloud. Then you can use the specific tools you need to track what’s happening, such as tutorials on planning your cloud adoption for tips on identifying metrics to define your KPIs. Be sure to choose tools that integrate with your operating systems and platforms. The cloud monitoring capabilities you need down the line might even determine which cloud provider you opt for today. After evaluating your current application resource requirements, you’re ready to choose a cloud provider that meets your needs . But whether you move all your apps and services at once or take the hybrid approach of keeping some apps on-premise, most migrations follow the same basic steps.

Let’s outline the major steps involved in any successful cloud migration. A cloud migration strategy requires careful planning, testing, and resourcing. The stakes are high when a cloud migration process kicks off. Both business and operations need to be secure from the get-go. A good cloud migration strategy needs to ensure that this aspect is taken care of, and the organization leverages the cutting-edge technology of the cloud to surge ahead.