Wednesday, 12 February 2020 / Published in Cloud Migration, online business, Technology

7 Facts Everyone Should Know About Cloud Migration

Cloud computing is becoming popular among businesses owing to the multitude of benefits it offers. It is future-enabled, cost-effective, scalable, secure, flexible, faster, customizable and more!

In fact, today it is increasingly becoming difficult to imagine businesses without the cloud. However, migrating to a cloud platform is quite a challenging task involving its own share of hardships. It requires a proper mindset, tactical planning as well as right cloud migration strategies, techniques, and tools.

What is Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration is the process of moving the digital business operations including data, systems, services, storage, and applications to a cloud-based environment. It is much like move to a larger office but digitally. The migration is quite often described as the move from on-premises or legacy infrastructure to the cloud platform. Of all, the most demanding task in the transition is moving the entire database of an organization especially if there are huge amounts of data involved. It would require quite a lot of preparation beforehand but the end result would be worth the effort.

Here are 7 important facts that you should consider for a successful and smooth transition to the cloud:

Assessing The Resources

To realize the full benefits of the cloud migration journey, it is essential to do a detailed assessment of the organization’s resources including data, technology, and application architecture. It will enable your businesses to determine what applications can be readily moved and what cannot be mapped to the cloud environment.

Know The Migrating Components

Before moving forward, make sure to have a thorough understanding of how the various component works, and what can be expected out of a cloud platform. Preparing the performance metrics detailing and comparing the current performance of your business application and expected performance post-migration will enable the appropriate restructuring of the components.

Ensure Data Security And Privacy

While moving to the cloud, security and privacy are two of the major concerns.

It is imperative for the organizations to make sure that the different types of data used throughout the service to be migrated adhere to the regulatory compliance and internal business policies. Also, they should be proactive in taking appropriate security measures for each data type and manage the related risk or threat that may arise during the transition.

Analyze The Costs

To realize the benefits of the cloud environment also leads to challenges around governance and cost.

A detailed cost analysis must be executed by the organizations before migrating to the cloud-based platform. Doing a comparative analysis of the present costs of operating the business vis-a-vis the post-migration costs would give a solid understanding of migration costs involved making the implementation of the process quite straightforward.

Focusing on creating rich metrics around code quality, migration cost changes at different stages would further help in creating a strategy that suits your budget, requirement and expected scalability.

Moving The Applications

While moving the applications to the cloud-based platform, you have two approaches available. The first one is the lift-and-shift method wherein the applications are just lifted and uploaded to the cloud. This may involve a high maintenance cost.

The second approach is where businesses need to should re-architecture the applications to accommodate cloud-native features and ensure compatible performance in the new environment.

Understanding Scalability

Scalability is an important factor to consider while moving to a cloud-based platform. It is imperative to understand which business applications can be scaled horizontally.

Horizontal scalability simply means the ability to scale wider and increase the capacity to deal with traffic. It is done by connecting multiple hardware or software entities such as servers so that they work as a single logical unit.

In case, there no horizontal scaling possible, there would be diminishing returns and system resistance.

Selection of tool

Selecting the right cloud migration tool is quite a tricky task.

Make sure you move your data to the cloud using the latest-generation migration tools so that there is a seamless migration wherein the user experience is not interrupted. It is well-known that cloud migration tools can easily handle huge volumes and various types of data and applications.

The selection of the right tool to enable successful migration would entirely depend on your business requirements, database, servers, and resources.

Sum up

Cloud services have been around for years but still, the concept is still relatively among the employees of organizations, so a change in management is another challenge to be dealt with.

Remember that cloud migration is an important decision that can help you optimize your business operations and achieving real-time updated performance provided it is done efficiently. A thorough assessment, research, analysis, support of the employees and coordination among the departments of the organization would certainly ease the migration. It will help you come up with a solid cloud migration strategy that would be cost-effective and let you deliver meaningful business value.