As technology proliferates, it transforms the lives of individuals and businesses. Indeed, the evolution of digital transformation and partnership-building technologies has taken over the business world, completely changing and shaping the way people do business. As a result, organizations are embracing several digital transformation trends that they can capitalize on as they achieve greater scalability and improve business operations. There are many technology trends that businesses can follow, but there are a few that have captured the attention of most businesses and will continue to do so for years to come.
With current technology trends appealing to brands more than anything else on the market, it could be a cloud migration strategy. Cloud-based solutions have also proven beneficial to many organizations, including reinventing complex business processes, streamlining key areas of business operations, increasing agility, and reducing bottlenecks. With so much to watch when it comes to cloud migration trends, cloud migration plans and related services may be completely new to many. Because of this, most companies neglect the strategy of considering cloud migration in their business.
Migrating digital assets and services to the cloud is not an easy task. Moving to the cloud involves a complete transition and a well-planned strategy. Additionally, technological advancements have forced brands to use modern cloud migration tools that make the migration process easy.
However, before discussing cloud migration steps and strategies, let’s start by discussing the basics, considerations, and processes organizations use to implement cloud migration strategies.
What is your cloud migration strategy?
To understand your cloud migration strategy, it is important to first understand “What is cloud migration” and the basics of cloud storage. The Cloud, also known as a scalable set of virtual networks, is one of the technology trends that has been around for a long time in the ecosystem. It consists of online servers running over the Internet. Google Drive, Dropbox, and iCloud are common examples of cloud storage.
The process of moving all digital assets, system resources, databases, and computing processes to the cloud is now called cloud migration. Moving to the cloud is not something you immediately decide to do. Organizations need to map out the entire migration process, which depends on many factors such as database size and complexity, interoperability, and more. In other words, the migration process involves several risks that must be carefully assessed.
Example of cloud migration
A cloud migration strategy is a complex process with significant challenges, which is why many business leaders recommend consulting cloud migration case studies and examples from other companies and to learn from their experiences. There are many well-known companies like Amazon, Spotify, Etsy, that successfully migrated to the cloud and the results are certainly inspiring.
Types of Cloud Migrations
When transferring workloads to the cloud, companies often use six different types of strategies. The IT team keeps a complete view of all infrastructure elements and options available to fully move any workload throughout a cloud migration. Here are some of the most common types of cloud migration strategies.
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Lift and Shift model
One of the simplest cloud migration patterns, this cloud migration path is aptly named and takes a lift-and-change migration approach. This means that the team performing the migration can take applications, server operating systems, and more from your existing hosting environment and move them to the public cloud infrastructure without any changes.
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Platform changes
Platform change means re-hosting, platform switching, and not just moving your environment directly to the cloud but following a cross-platform database review and optimization strategy. This includes significant changes and optimizations to the operating system to adapt to the cloud environment.
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Redemption
As the name suggests, this cloud migration allows companies to choose an entirely new cloud-based platform or service instead of opting for an existing platform or service. In this type of cloud migration, the owner moves the services and applications to the new cloud-native platform.
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Redesign
This is one of the types that is often used when the discussion of cloud migration strategies reaches the marketplace. This type of migration is often implemented by large organizations that want to change their entire business architecture and build all their applications from scratch. Companies have developed this approach to explore the possibilities of the cloud beyond their traditional environment.
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Retreat
According to the company, removing certain applications and workloads that are no longer used before migration is essentially a retired cloud migration. Removing a part does not mean permanent removal, but rather changing some important factors to reduce the complexity of the procedure.
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Retaining
Technically, this shouldn’t be considered another type of cloud migration strategy and consideration, but many marketers include it in their migration plan. Maintenance is simply the process of setting a time frame for cloud adoption. Organizations often decide not to move to the cloud because they don’t think it’s a good fit for their business right now.
Three Stages of Cloud Adoption
A cloud migration strategy identifies the most effective order in which to migrate applications to the new infrastructure. However, it is not as simple as one may believe to move data and other business-related components to a cloud-based environment. Although there are many types and approaches to cloud migration, the steps and considerations in cloud migration are the same. Here are the three steps to cloud migration:
The 3 steps to migrating to the cloud;
Pre-Migration
This is the main step where the organization must have a well-planned strategy to start the transition. This step focuses on migration workload analysis.
Migration
This is the stage where the middle stage, the transition, takes place. Here, IT staff consider all cloud deployment practices and availability, which is done only after the environment has been properly assessed.
Post-Migration
This is the final step in considering your cloud migration. As the name suggests, this layer takes care of the implementation of what happens after the transition. This includes post-migration support, upgrades, troubleshooting, and more.
Whenever the term cloud migration grabs people’s attention, a look at cloud migration tools also piques the curiosity of business leaders. AWS Migration Services, Azure Migration Tool, and Google Migration are some of the popular cloud migration tools that companies can use to move to the cloud quickly and easily.
7 Key Strategic Considerations for Cloud Migration
Cloud migration services are proven to help you grow your business. Before moving to the other side, if you are wondering what a cloud migration service is, we will clear this doubt. Cloud migration services are another way of describing cloud adoption, which is unique to each organization, so do not confuse.
Cloud adoption is one of the ways organizations embrace digital transformation, but in all cases, cloud migration workflow models, strategies, and approaches are among the potential that companies often overlook. Cloud computing trends in recent years have started to make companies go bankrupt, and one needs to have a second thought when considering cloud migration.
With this in mind, we cover some of the important factors that companies should consider before migrating their applications to the Cloud.
Adequate staff training
It is probably the most important strategy you can rely on to direct the entire cloud migration process. If your employees are not familiar with cloud services and do not know how cloud services work in other business environments, the entire exercise will be futile. So, before accepting a move to the cloud, train your employees, so they understand the concept of integrating business components into an online server.
Find application dependencies
Discovering the application’s integration capabilities and dependencies is as important as any other strategy. However, for most companies, identifying opportunities after the transition has taken place or is at the end of the process is another ballgame. As such, they may delay planned procedures and take advantage of limited opportunities to explore cloud migration strategies. There are integrations between applications that must be understood to plan for cloud adoption.
Application Architecture
There are different types of cloud migration strategies, and platforms, allowing organizations to explore multiple options before finalizing a particular environment. With SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, and more, the application architecture offers organizations to evaluate the optimized platform and interoperability of their applications. It helps organizations understand which architectures need to be changed so they can adapt and align their cloud infrastructure for the transition.
Infrastructure Stack
Before running your applications on an online server, your infrastructure stack defines the roles for which the migration architect will assist you. The infrastructure stack is the set of resources and services provided by the business environment. By determining the correct availability and utilization of company resources, you can better design your cloud environment. This is an important aspect of a successful migration, so you need to consider your technical planning.
Workload Analysis
There are many cloud migration workloads and practices that organizations consider when moving to the cloud, but there are a few: general computing workload, CPU-intensive, memory-intensive, static, periodic, and hybrid. These are highly valued by the company. Because the workloads are cloud services or applications, the IT team has the advantage of being able to decide how to identify all critical factors before deciding which workloads to migrate from the cloud.
Systems Compatibility
System accessibility plays an important role when implementing a cloud migration strategy. When opting for cloud transition, it is important to have the latest versions of the operating system, middleware, and databases. If you don’t, you may likely face more errors in the future than you face now. Cloud migration isn’t just about how you manage it, but also about determining how sensitive data will be handled during the transition.
Understanding access points
When introducing digital transformation to your business, it is important to keep the user experience in mind. Therefore, as business owners implement new cloud migration strategies, they should also monitor application usage, and identify post-migration impacts. In other words, it is good that companies think more about improving the user experience and take advantage of the opportunities that make it possible.
Conclusion
Cloud migration is a daunting task, and organizations implementing a cloud migration strategy for the first time should consider several important factors before beginning the cloud transition process. There are diverse and competent cloud vendors, tools, and technologies in the space used by organizations working on multiple cloud migration projects.
The need for a reliable Cloud Service provider who has the flexibility is more important today than ever. Cloud adoption has become a critical part of IT optimization. Moving to the Cloud allows businesses to increase agility, reduce inefficiency, and provide a better customer experience.
