The Roadmap To Your Cloud Migration Journey

Cloud migration occurs when an enterprise moves its data centre capabilities to the cloud. It typically runs on cloud infrastructure provided by cloud service providers such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. As more and more companies move to the cloud, cloud-to-cloud migrations are occurring more often. However, there are some important considerations to keep in mind when flying to the cloud. We will discuss this in the coming paragraphs.

What are the main benefits of Migrating to the CLOUD?

The benefits of the cloud often revolve around efficiency and Maximization with minimal cost. For organizations that have successfully migrated to the cloud, the benefits include reduced cost, increased scalability, and security.

 Costs:

Organizations migrating to the cloud often spend significantly less on IT operations because cloud providers handle maintenance and updates. Instead of getting involved in getting things to work, companies can refocus their resources on other important business tasks, developing new products, or improving existing products.

Scalability: 

Cloud computing can be scaled to support larger workloads and multiple users much easier than on-premises infrastructure, allowing companies to license physical servers, network devices, or additional software.

Flexibility: 

Anyone including employees and customers can access the cloud services and data they need anytime from anywhere. This will allow your business to expand into new territories, serve overseas audiences, and offer employees work flexibility.

Performance:

For enterprises running the traditional way, moving to the cloud can improve performance and the overall user experience of their customers. Applications and websites that are hosted in the cloud are easy to scale to serve a large number of customers and can run in geographical locations near end-users, to reduce network latency.

Cloud Migration Challenges

Lack of Cloud Migration Strategy

Migrating to the cloud without a proper strategy can cause havoc to your business. Successful cloud migration needs a well-thought cloud migration plan. Your business uses multiple applications, where each has to need different considerations and requirements to be met while moving to the cloud. That’s why you need a well-defined business case for each entity for a seamless migration to the cloud.

Cost Management

Migrating to the cloud could help save a lot, but with no plans on cost and cost management, you end up investing more with no plans on ROI. From a cost point of view, it would be hard to determine what you saved. Cost management is key, as cloud environments are dynamic and cost could vary with upgrades and growth in the number of users.

Data integrity

Your business has a cloud migration plan, but no plans on data integrity are a common reason for failure. After the data is transferred to the cloud, you should have a plan in action to ensure no data leakage during the process.

Data Security and Compliance

One of the biggest issues faced by enterprises when migrating to the cloud is data security and compliance. The cloud providers offer robust security measures but as they use a shared responsibility model, you are responsible for securing data and workloads. Your organization must correctly configure the security measures offered by your cloud service provider while ensuring appropriate security controls across services and applications.

Cloud Migration in 4-Steps 

Planning

Before migrating data to the cloud, you need to identify the use cases that your business will use. Get answers to these questions: Are you going to use it for disaster recovery? Do you want to host your enterprise workloads with a full migration to the cloud? Or you will opt for a hybrid approach?

At this point, determine your reliance on the data. it is important to assess the environment and identify the factors driving the migration, including legacy data, critical application data, and application interoperability. Find if there is any data that needs to be re-synchronized often, the data compliance requirements of your business and what data to be moved to the cloud-first?

Knowing the above requirements is a base for a solid migration plan and action. so do the first thing first.

Build a Business Case

Once all your business needs are defined, it’s time to understand the associated services offered by the cloud provider and other partners and their associated costs. The second step is to identify the expected benefits of cloud migration in three aspects: cost savings, operational benefits, and architectural improvements.

You need to build a business case for each application that you plan to move to the cloud and find the estimated total cost of ownership (TCO) of the cloud versus the current total cost of ownership (TCO). Calculate the cost that you save, understand the pricing model of the cloud provider and list the resources.

Moving to the cloud

After evaluating and planning your environment, you need to perform the migration. The main challenge here is to complete the migration in the shortest time and the shortest cost with minimal impact on current operations. Doing this with utmost ease is to have a cloud consultant working closely with your team.

If a user in transit loses access to data, it can impact your business. The stands true when you continue to synchronize and update your system after the initial migration. You must find a way to synchronize the changes made to the source data during the migration. Both Azure and AWS offer integrated tools that make it easy to migrate to the AWS Cloud and migrate your Azure data.

Maintenance 

After a successful cloud migration, it is important to ensure that it is optimized, secure, and easy to recover in future. Along with real-time monitoring, you should evaluate the security of your stored data to ensure that your work in the new environment is in synch with regulatory compliance.

Ready For an UpLevel?

Without the right strategy, you can reduce your chances of getting the cloud benefits you need. There are many common mistakes that businesses make when migrating to the cloud, and a foozle migration to cloud can lead to increased costs and low performance. Many reports say that more than half of companies are not enjoying the expected benefits of the cloud. This is often due to the wrong migration strategy and a lack of necessary cloud talent.

If you’re using the cloud but the benefits are not as expected or you need cloud migration advice, we are your destination. Talk to our Cloud consultants today!