Cloud migration involves moving data, applications and processes to the cloud. This can be from on-site implementations like owned servers, or from another cloud host. Moving to the cloud can be daunting, especially if you haven’t made the transition before. Even if you’re familiar with cloud computing, planning and executing a migration still requires forethought and strategic, as well as technical, consideration.
In this post, we’ll look at the reasons to perform a cloud migration, the different ways cloud computing can work, and a pre-launch checklist for a stable, safe and secure cloud migration.
Moving from your own server room to the cloud means your IT becomes more secure, more adaptable, and more accessible.
Major cloud providers offer enterprise-grade security and compliance features as standard. Amazon’s AWS, one of the most popular, delivers workflow integrations for permissioning, automated compliance, and ‘all data flowing across the AWS global network that interconnects our datacenters and regions is automatically encrypted at the physical layer before it leaves our secured facilities.’
Cloud is much more scalable than on-site or owned solutions, because it’s an operating rather than a capital expense. When loads increase, buy more bandwidth; when they fall, scale back.
Suppose you’re a business, and it’s 2019. Black Friday is going to test your equipment to the limit; you might need to upgrade, a major capital expense. In a normal year, that equipment might sit idle until Christmas or until next Black Friday: sunk money, depreciating while it earns you nothing. But we know that’s not what happened. Instead, some businesses, like ecommerce, got a totally unforeseeable explosion of customers. Others had to weather over a year of radically reduced receipts. In both cases, cloud would have let those businesses manage their money much better.
Some businesses already run their operations partially or fully in the cloud. But they need to move to a different cloud platform. Most cloud providers offer SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services (more on these below), so it’s relatively unusual to seek to change vendors to access these. Since all the major cloud providers can essentially get you as much data storage space and computational resources as you’re ever likely to need, those are seldom the reasons.
Instead, it’s likely to be because:
Cloud migration can take two broad approaches.
Move your existing applications and databases to the cloud, either simply rehosting them or improving their functionality at the same time. This approach is less ambitious, and can be a simple ‘lift and shift’ that leaves user experience and functionality largely unaffected. It makes sense if your chief concerns are around security, modernization, reliability and accessibility. But it doesn’t leverage the full potential of cloud computing.
Cloud computing allows for far greater automation and scalability than conventional on-site servers. Technical migrations seek to take advantage of this, leaving your data intact and mission-critical applications accessible while seeking to enhance functionality and data value, including by restructuring data and transforming applications, operating systems and databases.
We can help you select the right cloud implementation for your business goals, and match your needs with tech solutions, helping with both technical and strategic migrations. Whether you’re moving to the cloud for the first time, switching providers, or looking for ways to get more out of the cloud, AndPlus can help you get there.
Cloud computing can be done in several different ways. You can have a single cloud, hosted on servers that you control directly. You can use public cloud. Some businesses opt for a mix of both and an increasing number turn to multi-cloud implementations.
Public cloud is cloud computing delivered over the internet, and shared by multiple organizations. Public cloud data centers are owned by a major supplier (often Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or Oracle). They virtualize your servers, with backups and failovers, and they own, control, and manage the hardware.
Public cloud is characterized by high elasticity and flexibility, and by typically low-cost subscription pricing models. It’s well-suited to both predictable demand scenarios like provisioning an organization’s IT, and peak-and-trough demand. Cost is agile and involves no capital expenditure. However, you don’t get much technical control.
Private cloud is devoted solely to your organization. You lose some benefits — easy scalability, SLA-backed uptime — but you gain control and privacy. The privacy benefits can be overstated, since many public cloud provisions are end-to-end encrypted, but private cloud can be a better option from a compliance viewpoint too.
Private cloud is characterized by efficiency, exclusivity, and control. You can scale without trading off security, so it’s well-suited to organizations that have specific security needs as well as to larger enterprises or those that need custom security and compliance arrangements. It gives you control, including technical control, but the price is higher than public cloud, scalability is infrastructure-dependent, and mobile access usually suffers as compared to public cloud.
A cloud environment that uses a mix of both public and private clouds, hybrid cloud is highly scalable and flexible, but includes compatibility and integration issues. It’s usually selected for specific purposes such as when there are two distinct workflows with very different requirements. If a business has a client-facing network that must be mobile-friendly and accessible, together with a staff-only network that must be highly secure, hybrid cloud can be a good solution.
Hybrid cloud offers flexible policy-driven deployment, reliability and cost control, but can be more complex to implement.
Where hybrid cloud uses two types of cloud, multi-cloud uses two cloud implementations, sometimes from different vendors or having different specifications. Multi-cloud implementations are not connected, so multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are mutually exclusive at the same level. But many businesses have multiple clouds, some of which are hybrid clouds. Controlling cloud sprawl is a key CIO concern as complexity and size of implementations proliferates. Common reasons to choose multi-cloud include proximity issues in large, distributed organizations, flexibility and failover.
AndPlus can help you select and optimize the right cloud structure for your business needs. We’ll work with you to identify opportunities and avoid potential pitfalls so when you do your cloud migration, it goes right — the first time.
Cloud computing can be serviced in several ways. The difference lies in how far down the stack you want your cloud implementation to reach.
SaaS (Software as a Service) cloud accounts for about 24% of all cloud implementations. These are SaaS applications running on cloud infrastructure. So you might run your business on G Suite, SalesForce and Mailchimp, with a little ZenDesk and Docusign. Running those same applications through a public or private cloud implementation is SaaS cloud. It’s quick to adopt and simple, but relatively inflexible and hard to customize.
PaaS (Platform as a Service) cloud computing involves running a bundle of applications and the computing they depend on, all on the cloud. This is taking the same idea as SaaS cloud and going a layer deeper, using tools like AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku, Windows Azure, Force.com, OpenShift, or Apache Stratos.
The most popular PaaS options are data warehouse, relational database as a service (DBaaS) and container-as-a-service.
Infrastructure as a Service cloud implementations involve buying access to infrastructure elements, then building enterprise stacks on them. You’ll move elements like physical computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, and backup to the cloud, then provide access to them via high-level APIs.
The level of your stack that you move to the cloud is essentially a business decision, not a technical one: it’s about choosing the tools that best serve your needs. But we’ve helped businesses make those kinds of decisions before, many times. And we can guide you to the best cloud service model for your budget, goals and business.
Cloud migration is best done with a trusted partner who can supply the technical expertise and experience, and translate your business goals and operational requirements into appropriate tools, platform and process choices.
At a minimum, look for:
There are three key areas of preparation for cloud migration:
Before a cloud migration begins, it’s crucial to make technical decisions like identifying technical requirements, choosing an appropriate level of cloud integration, and selecting or constructing the right cloud environment to suit your business needs.
It might also be necessary to purchase some new equipment or to prepare to dispose of some old equipment after migration is complete. IT staff might need some technical preparation of their own, depending on how up-to-date their skills are and the role envisioned for them after migration.
Technical considerations include:
Determining how and whether to migrate to the cloud is a strategic business decision, not an IT decision, even if you’re only doing a ‘lift and shift.’ Considerations for cost-benefit analysis of cloud migration include:
Migrating data to the cloud is an ideal opportunity to assess, clean and potentially discard data. This is future compliance, data organization, and accuracy, all being built before you even begin your migration.
Many businesses have lakes of unstructured data that’s accessible but never accessed, and duplicated or out-of-date data. Moving to the cloud can let you finally access some of the value of this data, applying modern data tools to unsorted, unstructured data lakes. But it’s also smart not to move data that you’re better off permanently deleting.
If you don’t have the time and resources for a full data clean and assessment, and you’re not planning on using big data techniques to extract value from it, try to identify the 20% that delivers 80% of the value and consider dumping the rest.
In a 2021 survey, 77% of CISOs agreed that the only way for security to keep up with modern business infrastructure is by using automation. Cloud migration can result in a far more secure enterprise — but the process of migration can create vulnerabilities. The cloud is also not automatically secure, it has to be made that way through best practice. For instance, all cloud databases can be encrypted, and all should be; but 49% are not.
Along with automation comes the risk of automating the wrong actions. Misconfigured identity and access management protocols make cloud databases and applications vulnerable, yet 73% of AWS-based implementations are misconfigured.
If you devote little time to planning, your migration could take a long time. If you put the work in at the planning stage, execution will be relatively simple and fast. A detailed plan that identifies and mitigates risks and lays out a roadmap and timeframe makes migrations smooth.
Such a plan should include:
Planning a migration is a complex process, with many opportunities to get it wrong. Like any such project, project management best practices will only get you so far. You ideally want to be working with an experienced team who know how to make the process go smoothly, but almost no organization has one of these in-house. Even if your IT team is large, well-qualified and knowledgeable about cloud computing, they’re unlikely to have much experience in actually moving a business’ systems to the cloud. But we’ve been doing just that for over a decade. We know how to construct a migration plan that will leave you with 100% uptime, all your data secure and safe, and with multiple fail-safes.
If you’ve planned comprehensively and sourced the skills you need to migrate safely and effectively, execution should be rapid and simple. During the process, remember:
Getting a cloud migration wrong can be time-consuming and expensive. As well as dollars and hours, you can dissipate goodwill and enthusiasm for the project and stall your digital transformation or cloud adoption process.
AndPlus has been working with businesses to get cloud migrations right for over a decade. We know that with proper planning and preparation, your cloud migration can be simple and painless. And we know how few in-house IT teams are prepared to manage one.
Whether you’re seeking to migrate infrastructure, platform, databases or applications, we can help you successfully move to leading cloud platforms including Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, VMWare, and IBM.
We’ll work with you at two levels: strategically, we’ll match your business needs and goals with the best cloud options for you. Technically, we’ll wrangle your data, create backups and fail-safes, and implement and optimize the applications you’ve selected.
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