The Best Cloud Migration Approach

The Best Cloud Migration Approach

Cloud fluency ensures your entire organization is on the same page, so you don’t have a small pool of cloud pros overburdened as cloud translators. A Cloud Guru’s 2020 State of Cloud Learning Report has more info on how organizations are pursuing cloud learning. Databases — Getting massive amounts of data to the cloud can take time. To help, some providers offer options for physically copying your data to provided hardware that you then ship off. Dependencies — Application dependencies get complicated real quick and bring migrations to a screeching halt.

the best cloud migration approach

The process may involve extensive changes to the way your landscape is run and managed as well as the landscape itself. Your new, upgraded system will likely have greater automation, and require different competencies than your on-premise legacy system. That may warrant a change to a managed services model, and a new approach to management emphasizing proactive planning. Properly handled, that means more consistent performance, lower cost and less downtime in the future. It can also free up your internal IT team to focus on strategic goals, rather than putting out fires. A technical migration can also prepare organizations for a future application migration.

Why Is It Called The Cloud?

The repurchase strategy is often applied when using a proprietary data based platform or proprietary product. It’s important for leadership to be clear on the purpose of the migration — and set aggressive goals to drive the organization forward. This includes creating a baseline of your current IT infrastructure and forming some cloud migration key performance indicators .

The organization needs to ensure that all functionality is replicated by the new system, along with business process flow. Old data must be audited, discarded where appropriate and reformatted to work with the new system. On top of that, there’s the requirement to retrain the team in a new suite of applications, which might function quite differently from the previous application stack. Second, the costs of an on-premises infrastructure are mostly composed of capital expenditures , while a cloud-based infrastructure usually comes out of operating expenses . Depending on how your business manages its books, CapEx may be easier to come by than OpEx, or vice versa. When you move an application from an on-premises data center to the cloud, there are two ways you can migrate your application—a shallow cloud integration or a deep cloud integration.

Cloud Migration Strategy: Lift & Shift Vs Optimized Migration

New services can be accessed with a few mouse clicks, so when a new need, challenge, or opportunity arises, it’s possible to respond immediately. “Cloud agility” is often used to describe the ability to quickly develop, test, and launch business applications. But cloud also gives you the agility to respond quickly as needs change. Keep in mind, an organization’s cloud spend can get out of control without the proper planning and execution, and cloud isn’t inherently a money-saving move if done improperly. Watch this free on-demand webinar to see how to stay on top of it all.

  • While trying to answer this question, take SaaS solutions and other alternatives into consideration.
  • Migrate for Compute Engine — Get enterprise applications running in Google Cloud while data migrates in the background.
  • It might also involve using a cloud-specific data store such as Amazon S3 or DynamoDB.
  • Airbnb switched to Amazon RDS and dropped MySQL during their migration to AWS.

With this intuitive, cloud-based solution, everyone can work visually and collaborate in real time while building flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, and more. Features like data linking help you monitor your progress and ongoing performance right from Lucidchart. Simply link your metrics to your migration plans so you always have your finger on the pulse. When you understand your baseline performance (i.e., current performance benchmarks), you can validate post-migration performance and even diagnose problems that arise during migration. This readiness assessment provides a gap analysis of your organization and helps you identify which applications are ready for migration.

Cloud Migration Strategies

It retired 209 application environments that reduced the attack surface and migrated 239 apps with 97% cost efficiency. Overall, the enterprise achieved improved business outcomes, reduced costs, better end-user experience, and stronger security. Pinterest migrated from AWS’s legacy cloud to the next-gen cloud computing system when it reached over 250 million customers and served more than 1,000 microservices with different infrastructure layers and tools. It followed the ‘lift, tinker, and shift’ approach to move the microservices to Docker containers powered by Kubernetes. As a result, it reduced the instance hours for the engineers and made it cost-effective.

Transfer Appliance — For offline bulk data migration, Transfer Appliance lets you securely capture, ship, and upload data using 100TB or 480TB models. AWS Server Migration Service — This service makes it easy and quick to move workloads to AWS, particularly when dealing with large-scale server migrations. AWS Migration Hub — This hub lets you track the progress of migrations across AWS solutions, helping you pick the right tools, track metrics, and more. Retiring — After looking over everything in your environment, you’re likely to discover there are things you can axe without consequences. Saves money, improve security, and give your people one less tool they have to learn to use. And cloud can also make it easier for organizations with multiple offices — eliminating the need to set up infrastructure in each location.

the best cloud migration approach

Actions such as deploying cloud firewalls will replace the previous network perimeter of the former on-site network. With the added functionality, scalability, and flexibility, the price may be worth the initial investment coupled with cloud computing’s falling cost. A company can maintain many of its applications, but with the added benefit of cloud-native services, such as scaling or automation. Companies with low demands from their cloud operations or currently run on several virtual machines can experience the greatest benefit from this route. Switching to the cloud will free up the IT department, allowing them to focus on more worthwhile pursuits such as data governance and network infrastructure. By choosing a cloud-based solution, organizations can deliver enhanced performance while staying on top of technology’s latest innovation.

the best cloud migration approach

That makes this approach desirable by governmental and financial industries that seek maximum control or customization. The private cloud may be located in a data center on-site or hosted by a provider in a remote location. NetApp makes cloud migration easier with the help of Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the enterprise data management platform for use with native AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud services. Now that so many enterprises are already in the cloud, maximizing how to operate there more efficiently is becoming the focus of operations—Cloud Volumes ONTAP can make that possible.

What are the major cloud migration techniques?

The four types of cloud migration are called lift and shift, shift to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), application refactoring, and replatforming.

Cloud provider discovery tools can ensure you’ve got them all in sight. It’s a discovery solution that increases business intelligence to see and control environments across. Cloud-to-cloud migration — This involves moving from one cloud to another, like from AWS to Azure. In the order below, they run from easiest and fastest to more difficult . The process of scaling can be done automatically , based on, for example, the time of day or the amount of processor resources being used.

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. This acceleration is accomplished while also delivering automated data profiling and masking of sensitive data. This feature is used to replace sensitive information with falsified yet realistic values for additional security while retaining referential integrity across dev/test and data science environments. Sometimes companies will need to slowly move data across a long period before the on-premise system can be dismantled. Since cloud-based security requires a different approach than on-premise security, new methods need to be incorporated into the security posture.

Before you begin your cloud migration, establish the migration architect role to lead the effort. Cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, and Google typically offer services to help businesses migrate applications to the cloud. However, even with these rudimentary tools, many companies lack the specialization to transition over their workloads seamlessly. This lack of technical skills has seen a rise in cloud migration solution providers.

Multicloud is the use of multiple cloud services in a single environment. This can mean, for example, a mix of public and private clouds or using a mix of public cloud providers to reduce reliance on a single provider or to realize the benefits of more than one provider. Also known as brownfield migration, a system conversion transforms your application layer, along with the DB and OS layers.

Upskill or reskill 10 or 10,000 with the most comprehensive and up-to-date learning library. Plus, keeping data in the cloud rather than on your hard drive can also keep data from getting compromised if a device is stolen or misplaced. Almost anything you can do with a computer or a server is available as a service in the cloud.

This also makes sense if current regulatory or constitutional rules require you to store or run aspects of your services or business application on-premise or within specific regions. Out of all the migration approaches, it is easiest, least expensive, and safest to carry out what is known as a lift and shift migration. This fundamental cloud migration strategy is to take the existing data and applications and rehost them intact in the cloud. There is no need for any changes to the existing application, making this model the ideal approach for cloud migration strategy deadlines. This blog examines the lift and shift cloud migration model in detail, and will discuss how it can be assisted by Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

You don’t need to adjust the cloud server to match the previous environment. Instead, you have the opportunity to start small and scale up as needed, which means you save a lot of money while the cloud environment grows with the app itself. The trap with replatforming is that during the process the project scope can change and grow if unchecked to become a complete refactor. Managing scope and avoiding unnecessary changes is key to mitigating this risk.