A cloud migration occurs when a firm relocates some or all of its data centre capabilities to the cloud, Typically, cloud-based infrastructure provided by a cloud service provider such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure is used. Looking to secure your business then hire a cyber security experts.
As more businesses migrate to the cloud, cloud migrations are increasingly taking place within the cloud, as businesses migrate between different cloud providers (known as cloud-to-cloud migration). However, for those making their first journey into the cloud, there are a few key factors to be aware of, which we’ll go over below.
What Are the Primary Advantages of Migrating to the Cloud?
The following are some of the advantages that push enterprises to shift resources to the public cloud:
Scalability
Unlike on-premises infrastructure, cloud computing can readily scale to serve larger workloads and additional users. To scale up business services in traditional IT systems, organisations had to buy and install physical servers, software licences, storage, and network equipment.
Cost
Because cloud providers handle maintenance and upgrades, businesses that migrate to the cloud can spend much less on IT operations. They can commit greater resources to innovation, such as the development of new products or the enhancement of existing ones.
Migrating to the cloud can increase performance and end-user experience. Cloud-hosted applications and websites can quickly scale to serve more users or higher throughput, and they can run in geographical areas close to end-users to reduce network latency.
Users can access cloud services and data from any location, whether they are employees or customers. This contributes to digital transformation, improves customer experience, and equips employees with current, adaptable tools.
Cloud Migration Strategy
Gartner has identified five cloud migration methodologies, dubbed the “5 Rs” by the company. Organizations considering a cloud migration should examine which migration technique best meets their goals. Below is a brief description of each:
Rehost
Rehosting, often known as ‘lift and shift,’ entails the use of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Simply redeploy your current data and applications to the cloud server. This is simple to implement and thus appropriate for firms who are unfamiliar with cloud infrastructures. It’s also a fantastic alternative if changing the code is challenging and you want to keep your applications intact.Looking to hire a cyber security engineer for your business.
Refactor
Refactoring, sometimes known as ‘lift, tinker, and shift,’ is the process of tweaking and optimising your applications for the cloud. A platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model is used in this scenario. The applications’ underlying architecture remains constant, but changes are made to allow for greater usage of cloud-based tools.
Revise
Revising expands on prior strategies, necessitating more extensive changes to the architecture and code of the cloud-based services. This is done to allow apps to take full advantage of the cloud services, which may necessitate considerable code changes. This method necessitates forethought and specialised expertise.
Rebuild
Rebuilding extends the Revise approach by removing the existing code base and replacing it with a new one. This is a time-consuming approach that is only explored when firms determine that their old solutions do not satisfy current business needs.
Replace
Replacing is another technique to addressing the difficulties that underpin the Rebuild approach. The distinction here is that the corporation does not start from zero while developing its own native application. This entails migrating to a vendor-provided third-party, prebuilt application. The only thing you migrate from your previous application is the data, and the rest of the system is brand new.
A 4-Step Cloud Migration Process
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Cloud Migration Planning
One of the first actions to take before migrating data to the cloud is to identify the use case that will be served by the public cloud. Will it be employed in the event of a disaster? DevOps? Is it possible to host enterprise workloads entirely in the cloud? Or will a mixed strategy be most effective for your deployment?
It is vital to examine your environment and determine the elements that will control the migration, such as critical application data, legacy data, and application interoperability, at this stage. It is also vital to establish your data reliance: do you have data that must be resynced on a regular basis, data compliance obligations to meet, or non-critical data that may be transferred during the first few runs of the migration?
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Migration Business Case
Once you’ve assessed your business needs, learn about the services and rates offered by cloud providers and other partners. Determine the anticipated benefits of cloud migration in three dimensions: operational benefits, cost reductions, and architectural upgrades.
Create a business case for each application you intend to migrate to the cloud, comparing the predicted total cost of ownership (TCO) on the cloud to the present TCO.
Work with cloud providers to discover your cost-cutting alternatives based on your projected cloud implementation. Cloud providers have a variety of pricing schemes and provide substantial discounts in exchange for a long-term commitment to cloud resources (reserved instances) or a commitment to a specific amount of cloud spend (savings plans). These savings must be accounted for in your company plan in order to determine the exact long-term cost of your cloud migration.
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Cloud Data Migration Execution
After your environment has been appraised and a plan has been devised, you must carry out your migration. The major objective here is to complete your migration with as little disturbance to normal operations as possible, at the lowest possible cost, and in the shortest amount of time.
If your data becomes inaccessible to users during a migration, your business operations may suffer. The same is true after the first migration when you continue to sync and upgrade your systems. Before migrating another workload element, each individual workload element should be proved to work in the new environment.
You’ll also need to figure out how to synchronise changes made to the source data while the migration is in progress. Both AWS and Azure have built-in tools to help with AWS cloud migration and Azure data transfer, and we’ll see how users benefit from migrating with Cloud Volumes ONTAP services and capabilities later in this article.
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Ongoing Upkeep
Once the data has been transferred to the cloud, it is critical to guarantee that it is optimal, secure, and easily retrievable in the future. It also aids in the detection of real-time changes to essential infrastructure and the prediction of workload contentions.
In addition to real-time monitoring, you should analyse the security of data at rest to ensure that working in your new environment complies with regulatory compliance regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR.
Another factor to consider is achieving ongoing performance and availability benchmarks to guarantee your RPO and RTO objectives are met if they change.
