Cloud Migration 101

Your business may undergo a technology upgrade. How do you stay ahead of your competitors? Would it be easier to change everything if you had enough cloud storage? What if you didn’t have to worry about staging, testing, and getting engineers involved? A cloud migration would save you time and money.

Let’s start with an intro to cloud basics and take a high-level look at successfully accomplishing a cloud migration.

A Brief about cloud

So, exactly what is the cloud?

Cloud migration refers to moving applications, data, and entire corporate IT infrastructure to remote server sites and virtual environments. Application migration involves moving applications, infrastructure, data, and other workloads from on-premises locations such as enterprise data centers to a cloud environment or from one cloud to another.    

Cloud migration transfers an enterprise or complex organization’s IT resources from private servers and on-premises data center facilities to a public cloud architecture. Cloud migration may also include moving operations and data from one platform to another. Cloud migration also involves migrating applications and data from one cloud environment or facilitating their migration to another, a cloud-to-cloud migration model.   

The cloud migration management model is based on a legacy enterprise data center architecture that must be constantly maintained and upgraded to keep business services running. Many legacy applications on the enterprise network are not optimized for the cloud, so they must be prepared for migration with tools designed specifically for the business.    

TOOLS USED FOR CLOUD MIGRATION

Moving data and applications to the cloud requires tools to help you avoid common mistakes. The right tools and skills can make it easier to automate and transfer data from legacy on-premises resources to the cloud. Migration Services can provide organizations with the tools, automation, and skills to complete a secure migration to the cloud. By incorporating cloud migration solution providers into your enterprise migration strategy, you can automate critical data operations such as provisioning, versioning, masking, and synchronizing across multi-cloud architectures.  

Cloud providers such as Azure, Amazon, and Google often offer services to move applications to the cloud. These platforms enable companies to accelerate cloud transformation projects through API-based cloud data management. The entire migration process is typically provided and managed by major cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. Many legacy migration scenarios use this approach, where applications are migrated from on-premises hosting to the cloud.   

Companies typically refactor when an application is business-critical, but you need to move to the cloud. Data analytics platforms can be migrated to a hybrid cloud environment to maintain this flexibility. For example, a cloud migration plan might be designed to provide more resilient disaster recovery than is possible with your infrastructure or to reliably deliver real-time SaaS collaboration applications to increasingly remote employees instead of hosting business applications onsite. A hybrid strategy that includes a traditional data centre and one or more cloud service providers can make sense even for medium and large enterprises, especially if the transition to the cloud takes several years.    

For example, the migration schedule will include migration planning, staff training, and application refactoring for deep integration with the cloud. The migration plan should consider all workloads to be moved to the cloud and the order in which they should be migrated. Migration plans consider what data to move to the cloud, what to leave on-premises, and what new features and applications to add after the migration. Migration strategies consider which workloads to move to the cloud, which workloads to keep on-premises, and which new features and applications to add to the cloud.  

The type of data and applications transferred from a company and the location where assets are moved significantly impact the design and implementation of a migration strategy. Migration strategies typically cover risk assessment, budget, security, and the type of cloud, public or private, that will host each of the workloads being moved.    

CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES

A cloud migration strategy is a company’s plan to move its data and applications from on-premises infrastructure and servers to the cloud. Cloud rehosting consists of “lifting” applications, data, and physical and virtual servers from one location and “moving” applications to another without changing the migrated resources. Another type of cloud migration is reverse cloud exit and repatriation, where applications or data are migrated and moved back to on-premises data centers. Migration can also include a hybrid cloud, public cloud, and on-premises resources.    

Unstructured data management providers, including Voxturrlabs, enable organizations to migrate, build, and scale file-based workflows in the cloud, offering more storage options than a traditional NAS environment. Voxturrlab’s unstructured file data platform enables you to run petabyte-scale workloads across multiple large clouds without latency.    

Since migrating to the cloud can seem daunting at first, with many servers, configurations, and applications to be moved between environments, and business success is on the balance sheet, organizations typically start small, with workloads that don’t need to be entirely concocted. A cloud migration strategy often runs into roadblocks, especially when the analytics platform is not optimized for today’s multi-cloud world. While cloud migration offers many benefits, in the race to cloud adoption, companies sometimes ignore the risks of cloud migration, such as added latency, data loss, security breaches, lack of visibility, etc.    

Cloud Migration Challenges

Despite the many benefits of cloud migration, there are also several challenges to consider, such as

1. Data Security

When migrating data to the cloud, you need to ensure that it is properly secured and protected from unauthorized access.

2. Data privacy

You also need to consider how the data will be used and shared in the cloud to ensure compliance with privacy regulations.

3. Application compatibility

Not all applications are compatible with the cloud, so you may need to make changes to your existing applications or invest in new ones.

 

There are several best practices to remember when migrating to the cloud, including:

1. Define the business goals

The first step is to define the business goals for the migration, such as increased flexibility or cost savings.

2. Assess the current environment

You need to assess the current on-premises environment to determine which assets can be migrated to the cloud.

 3. Develop a migration plan

Once you have assessed the current environment, you can develop a plan for the migration, considering the above-mentioned factors.

4. Prepare for the migration:

You need to prepare by backing up data, testing applications, and making any necessary changes to your infrastructure. 

5. Test and validate:

Once the migration is complete, you need to test everything to ensure that it is working as expected and that there are no disruptions to business operations.

6. Go live:

After testing is complete, you can make the switch to the cloud and start using it for production.

FINAL WORDS!

Migrating to the cloud can be simple and easy if you think through everything you need to know ahead of time. Still, if your plan is half done, it can lead to unnecessary expenses, loss of essential data, or opening of security holes in your infrastructure. Moving too quickly to a rehosted approach and postponing the cost of upgrading or replacing mission-critical applications can result in higher post-migration cloud operating costs. Failure to design and implement the underlying “target zone” cloud environments into which workloads are migrated can increase security and compliance costs. The cost and effort associated with a successful migration depend on using cloud migration tools and the various data migration management processes.