Intelics Cloud

Login
Free Sign Up
Menu
Menu

Cloud Migration Strategies — Step-by-Step Guide

What is Cloud Migration?

The process of migrating data, infrastructure, and applications from legacy systems to a private, public, or hybrid cloud-based environment. The basic components needed to adopt cloud migration are cost-optimization, scalability, flexibility, reliability, and improved performance. Another very important component in implementing cloud migration is the ability to innovate fast and support remote work. However, it is not out of risks, as without strategising properly, migration can meet with risks, such as data loss, compliance issues, downtime, security, and increased complexity.  

Why It Matters?

It is very important to have a well-defined cloud migration strategy because it supports aligning business objectives by managing risk factors. Further, a cloud migration strategy also helps ensure a smooth transition.  

Cloud Migration Strategy - Definition

Cloud Migration Strategy refers to the detailed plan for how workloads, such as data, infrastructure, and applications, would be transitioned to the cloud. The process of transition also answers how, which, when, and why of workload migration. Moreover, the migration strategy ensures that the process aligns with the technical requirements, cost constraints, business goals, and operational readiness. So, your organisation may face risks regarding data loss, downtime, security vulnerability, cost overruns, and suboptimal cloud utilisation.  

7 Rs in Cloud Migration Strategies

Among the most widely adopted frameworks for cloud migration strategies include: 

  1. Rehost: This is commonly known as “lift and shift” as it moves applications “as-is” to clouds without even coding changes. This strategy is best for those with quick cloud adoption workloads.  
  2. Relocate: This strategy simply includes the movement of existing virtual machines, such as VMware-based, directly to the cloud infrastructure. So, if you need minimal changes along with preserving the virtualisation layer.  
  3. Replatform: It is also known as “lift and reshape” used in migrating workloads along with making some optimization, such as moving to managed databases. The migration is done to leverage better the cloud infrastructure by making minor changes in workcode.  
  4. Refactor: Redesigning the applications to be cloud-native, that is, microservices, containers, and serverless. Re-architecting is done for full exploitation of performance, scalability, and resilience. However, it often changes code and is also noted to adjust with the higher complexity.  
  5.  Repurchase: It refers to the “drop and shop” technique to replace the legacy apps with SaaS alternatives, as it is useful. However, the maintenance cost often outweighs the benefits of it.  
  6. Retire: Archive for applications that are no longer providing business for being outdated or unused.  
  7. Retain: Keeping certain applications when they are not suitable for clouds may be because of legacy dependencies, or compliance.  

Cloud Migration Approaches: Single, Multi-, Hybrid,

A various approaches of Cloud Migration are available for the organizations, but they have to assess first whether they can all the workload at once (through big bang), or in phases (using phased approach). It is dependent on the complexity, interdependencies, and risk of tolerance as the organizations are going to migrate. However, most experts recommend phased migration to reduce risk when in a complex environment. Depending on the business requirements, that is, based on redundancy, compliance, Mostly, it has been noted how important is to take decision about migration strategy for based on data sensitivity, business goals, governance, workload criticality, and governance. Therefore, Evaluation of existing environment is must as a good strategy for informing the right model of cloud for any particular workload. 

Step-by-Step Guide for Cloud Migration

  • Step 1: Cloud Readiness Assessment Assessing cloud readiness helps in examining the security, business objectives, security, cost, and ROI. Evaluation helps to identify the workloads that are suitable for migration. Even due to the assessment, it is possible to choose what workload should be retired or retained or which strategy for migration would be the best fit. 
  • Step 2: Selection of Appropriate Cloud Model Cloud models, such as private, public, or hybrid, are decided by organizations based on the types of workloads, compliance needs, performance requirements, or expenditure. Therefore, it is required that the migration strategy reflects the given choices, as it includes factors, such as regulatory mandates, integration needs, and security requirements.  
  • Step 3: Pre-Migration Phase Organizations prioritize and group their workload as dependent, standalone, and critical depending on the assessment. Definition of the migration phases, timelines, and sequence also depends on the evaluation structure. As detailed as the roadmap is, it reduces the cost overrun, scope creeps, and ensures smoother execution.  
  • Step 4: Governance Planning Governance planning of cloud migration is quite strict as it is accountable to access management, data security, encryption, applying shared responsibility, and compliance requirements. However, it has been shown how the weakness in access control, misconfiguration, or lack of encryption during the process of migration can result in data loss or breaches.  
  • Step 5: Execution  One of the simplest methods involves faster delivery of migration with minimal changes. The “Lift and Shift” method for relocating or rehosting is used to migrate or sometimes more optimized methods, such as refactor or replatform, are used depending on the strategy that has been used earlier. Advanced migration strategies include rearchitect or refactor, which are helpful for the applications to leverage the cloud-native features for the improvement of performance or reliability. However, advanced migration is often executed at higher complexity.  
  • Step 6: Validation The next step of migrating the document includes thorough testing for security, compliance, performance, or failover. The assessment ensures that the applications run correctly in cloud environments. However, the testing process does not end there, as the experts urge validation of certain areas before there is full cutover.  
  • Step 7: Post-Migration Optimization Finally, after validating, it is important to enable auto-scaling by using cloud-managed services to optimize costs and improve performance. Therefore, the process of post-migration optimization includes resizing your resources to get the right service. For modernization, it is possible to move to serverless, rearchitecting for microservices, or adopt DevOps to enjoy the full potential of the cloud.

Common Cloud Migration Challenges and How to Avoid Them

Among the common challenges faced while migrating cloud include cost overruns, lack of cloud expertise, performance degradation, loss of potential data, downtime, risks of security, or compliance issues. There is a high chance of prolonged migrations in case of integration complexity, dependencies, and limited visibility. Further, the lack of optimization of the cloud, there are chances to increase unexpected costs. Hence, in order to deal with the challenges, organizations must address the skill gap and must be flexible to adapt to changes.  

Best Tools and Practices

If you are willing to ensure long-term benefits from cloud strategies with minimal wastage, it is important to follow some best practices, such as dependency mapping, robust security planning, phased migrations, governance, and clear prioritization. To achieve the best solution, it is also important to continuously optimize post-migration through rightsizing, performance tuning, cost optimization, or governance.  

Summing Up

For migrating cloud strategies, it is significant to choose the right migration framework as per the business workload. A thorough pre-migration assessment executed beforehand increases the success rate. Finally, to avoid cloud migration failure, migration execution must be done through thorough testing, security, or post-migration optimization.