The exponential growth of cloud computing in recent years indicates only future progress. Cloud adoption grew in 2020, fueled by the pandemic & a shift to remote work. A Snow Software survey suggests that 82% of respondents accelerated their use of cloud services in 2020, with 60% saying their use of off-premises technologies has grown continuously. Businesses of all sizes are making efforts to shift their operations to the cloud, encouraged by the many advantages cloud technologies offer to businesses.
This all-inclusive blog leads you through the intense step-by-step plan for cloud migration. Before that, let's learn whether the migration is safe or not.
Is Cloud Migration Protected?
Security and Privacy are the primary barriers to public cloud migration. In real-life, top IaaS providers do their best to secure their user's data. They employ top-notch data security specialists, continuously update their software, and strive to adhere to modern data security regulations.
You can use a private cloud to have more security. This is a cloud environment devoted to one business only and hosted on the businesses' equipment or by a cloud provider. However, a private cloud may cost more & need more effort from your staff; this alternative renders an extreme security & customization level while delivering the same level of productivity & scalability as a public cloud.
A hybrid cloud environment is continuously gaining popularity, and it uses both private and public clouds. It has greater flexibility and scalability.
Step-By-Step Process of Cloud Migration
After realizing the advantages of the cloud environment with your business needs, it's time to prepare to migrate.
1) Define the Migration Scope & Pick a Cloud Migration Strategy
Begin by auditing & evaluating your app portfolio for cloud readiness. For example, What software do you use? Which apps bring and do not bring value in the cloud and should be turned off?
During this evaluation, you can use the TIME quadrant, one of the most successful methods to define what to do with each element of your existing system.
Your app category will help you recognize the right migration strategy. There are 6 strategies for cloud migration, also known as the 6 R's: rehost, refactor, retire, replatform, repurchase, and retain.
What Does Time Stand For?
- Tolerate: Once you know that migration apps to the cloud won't help you accomplish your business goals, or you can't shift them to the digital environment for conformity purposes, place them in the Tolerate section. Retaining the app on-premises are these app's best practices.
- Invest: This category has innovative apps with high business value; however, it requires some betterments and adjustments to deliver great value to your business. Rearchiteching and re-platforming are common strategies for this app type.
- Migrate: Under this section, you should place apps that have high business value and don't require extensive modifications. Use a rehosting strategy for them.
- Eliminate: Apps having low quality and business value should be removed. In such cases, you should use a repurchase or retire strategy.
You must also consider the dependencies between the app before choosing a migration strategy. For instance, will shifting one app to the cloud negatively impact the work of other apps?
2) Define Migration Success
The second step is a migration project plan to build KPIs. This will help you measure how well does cloud migration meet your business expectations & goals. Below is the type of KPIs you should measure pre and post cloud data migration:
Average response time - the time that the server typically takes to return the request results in a specified time.
Peak response time - the longest server response time in a certain period.
Overall uptime - the % of the time the server & app are accessible to end-users and running properly.
Error types - the no. of logged app errors & thrown expectations grouped by type
Error rates - the ratio between error requests & total requests
Network latency - the delay's between a user's request & the server's response.
No. of data exposures
CPU & memory use
Monthly billing
Hardware costs
Continuous staffing costs
External costs
3) Choose a Cloud Environment
Before choosing a cloud environment you should first define the cloud model. You can pick between a public cloud, private cloud & hybrid cloud model.
Another step is to choose a cloud provider. Gartner announces its Magic Quadrant each year that defines the best cloud IaaS providers for global enterprise adoption, capabilities, & service availability. In the 2020 Magic Quadrant, he defined 3 market leaders:
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS is a market leader available in 24 geographic regions, offering a broad range of services, and has proved to be super secure, scalable, & reliable. It has sizable technical documentation & a great set of cloud migration software to simplify migration & maintenance.
Microsoft Azure
Azure possesses high reliability & scalability and offers an SLA of 99.95%. It's a scalable & secure solution.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
This one offers live migrations of Virtual Machines during maintenance events. GCP is a cost-effective & secure solution that has a massive list of availability zones, possesses high performance & efficiency, & saves data redundantly.
4) Automate Migration
Several tools are available to do heavy lifting associated with cloud migration & post-migration support, helping businesses boost their cloud migration speed, reduce migration risks & downtime, and reduce migration costs. Also,
app development companies in 2020 using automation tools can increase their migration projects' success rate & witness faster time-to-value.
At times, you require to move 100s of app components & perform 1000s of performance tests to guarantee an effective migration. Cloud migration tools can allow developers to automate the migration process.
5) Perform a Pilot Migration
Performing a pilot migration helps you confirm if your migration strategy is successful and recognize what improvements you can make for a seamless large-scale migration.
To perform a pilot migration:
Prepare the cloud platform
Recognize the first adopters - data or apps with a low workload that will be migrated.
Move pilot workloads to the cloud
Measure and assess the performance & latency
Enhance processes, tools, and platforms as per the insights you receive.
Prepare for large-scale migration.
6) Migrate
Here you have made all preparations & proved your strategy. Now is the time to take the most crucial step in the migration process. In this step, you'll run the production migration & migrate your users and data to the cloud.
Cloud migration is a complex process that needs detailed preparation & great experience from the team responsible. If you want to migrate your system to the cloud-based infrastructure & seek developers, Hyperlink Infosystem is here to help you.