The Definitive Guide to Cloud Migration Strategy

The cloud migration services market is expected to be valued at USD 448.34 billion by 2026 and has been growing at a CAGR of 28.89%.

There is always a need to consider precise cloud migration strategies to enable business elements and components. Businesses are adopting the best cloud services to gain better business outputs.

Cloud adoption statistics suggest that by 2025, the data stored in cloud data centers will exceed 100 Zettabytes. These numbers show how the cloud market will grow in the upcoming years.

In this regard, you can get enhanced support with migrating your apps and data to a cloud environment. But, for that, there is a need to opt for a suitable cloud migration strategy.

In this article, you will learn about the strategies for migrating applications to the cloud, including related best practices for 2022.

What Is a Cloud Migration Strategy?

A cloud migration strategy serves as the concise plan an organization makes to move its data and applications right from on-premises architecture to the cloud. However, it’s worth noting that not all workloads benefit from running on cloud-based infrastructure. There is a need to validate the most efficient way to prioritize and migrate applications before they are being made live. A systematic, documented strategy is crucial.

How to Migrate a Cloud Application?

The migration Process for cloud applications takes into consideration a list of the steps. In this section, we will discuss the cloud migration process.

Important upfront work comes with determining how you expect the cloud to drive the business based on people, processes, technology, and market impact. A strategic approach to cloud migration lets enterprises maximize the potential benefits of the cloud. Logical strategy and execution require planning that sets the desired outcomes for present and future business agility.

Cloud computing migration strategy ensures delivery of elasticity, agility, and scalability that can also ensure helping your organization take advantage of emerging opportunities. Also, consider the mix of software as a service development, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) alongside platform as a service (PaaS) cloud architecture layers.

Also, ensure that you fulfill the hybrid and multi-cloud environments based on business needs and best practices.

Cloud Migration Strategy – The Ultimate Guide

In this section, you will learn about the types of cloud migration strategies that will be highly beneficial for the enterprises.

Utilization of the cloud has become inevitable to succeed in today’s digital era. This is one of the core platforms that find a use for the organizations increasingly migrating their applications to the cloud.

1. Rehosting
   When you wish to move your on-premises Oracle database to an EC2 instance in AWS, at such a point, there is a need for opting for the rehosting strategy!Rehosting works as the swiftest and simplest cloud migration strategy that transfers data without code-level deviations. The “Lift and shift” pattern is one of the top cloud migration strategies for enterprises to transfer data assets from one location to the other, that is, the on-premises infrastructure to cloud infrastructure.

   This strategy is the most beneficial one for large-scale migrations. Also, rehosting enhances the speed and performance of the cloud without paying a lot. Rehosting gets automated using tools like CloudEndure migration and AWS VM Import/Export. Also, the alternative is using manual implementation to gain cloud maturity.

2. Replatforming
   ‘Lift, tinker and shift’ strategy serves in the form of the modified version of rehosting. Replatforming enables making a few configurational changes to the apps. The objective of this principle is to suit the cloud environment without changing its core architecture.Developers commonly apply this approach to guarantee that the apps interact with the database on managed platforms like Google CloudSQL or Amazon RDS.

   The strategy to migrate applications to the cloud is the best when you wish to migrate with a time crunch. Also, it serves better to leverage the benefits of the cloud without refactoring.

3. Repurchasing
   This cloud migration strategy serves the motto of moving to a different product and repurchasing serves as a move to a SaaS platform. Let us take an example. You can go ahead with moving a CRM to Salesforce.com, a CMS to Drupal, and so on.
4. Refactoring / Re-architecting
   As a cloud-based infrastructure strategy, it can be said that Re-imagining architecture and development of an app typically using cloud-native features will be helping you with this move. With Cloud adoption, some companies saw costs rise by 20% to 50%. The strategy has been driven by a strong business need to add features and scale performance metrics that would’ve been difficult to achieve in the application’s existing environment.So, have you been exploring the best migration method and moving right from a monolithic architecture to a service-based architecture? If yes, you can get this option to boost agility or improve business continuity.
5. Retiring
   One of the cloud-migration solutions is to opt for retiring. When you have before now revealed everything in your explicit environment setting, it is better to enquire to every functional area who owns the specific application. This option makes it easier to get savings to boost the business case and direct the team’s insufficient attention to people’s elements. In addition to that, the motive, in this case, is to lessen the surface area of security.
6. Retaining
   Last but not least, we have retained it as one of the top cloud application migration strategies. There may be a point when you aren’t ready to prioritize an application recently upgraded as a business owner. Also, there may be a chance that you aren’t inclined to migrate some applications.The best option you can choose at such a point is to only migrate what makes sense for the business. When you notice that the gravity of the portfolio changes from on-premises to the cloud, at such a point, you will have fewer reasons to retain.

Building a Business Case that can Ensure Migration

Always there is a need for building a business case for migration with everything in mind regarding what you want to gain. Post-migration expectations of gains include:

• Cost savings
• Greater agility
• Opening up new business opportunities
• Entering new markets
• Reaching and fulfilling customer needs faster

There is a necessity for healthier application and workload management, alongside enhanced security levels and low Capex.

Choice of the Cloud Deployment Options

Security and governance serve as the top priorities for your infrastructure, workloads, applications, and storage on-premises as well as in the cloud. Also, there is a need to consider the complexities of cloud security that go beyond that of your current team.

One needs to comprehend the limits of the shared security model and levels being a professional cloud services provider. Also, there will be ease of building a solid, zero-trust security framework with the best tools and policies.

Assessment of the Cloud Migration Costs

As cloud migration is associated with multiple benefits, including dynamic scaling and cost reduction, effective execution comes with the need for a robust cloud migration strategy. So, you are required to assess migration costs and potential savings.

Hiring the Right Migration Team

There is a need for choosing the team with the maximum expertise for the successful migration: expertise and personnel serve as the key metrics to guarantee successful projects and tasks on time.

What are the Key Benefits and Gains of Migrating to the Cloud?

In this section, we will discuss the benefits of migrating to the cloud.

• Decreased hosting costs – There will be costs and conditions of keeping physical servers running with cloud migration. There is a need for third-party data center management of the servers, a subscription-based model to ensure lesser capital expenditure.
• Decreased footprint – The server capacity scales up and down, which will be helping in fitting the cloud needs. Potentially reduce the pool of data centers that can ensure reduced environmental impact.
• Precise agility and explicit scalability – Cloud-based services automatedly scale volume to mounting or shifting demand. Also, it can ensure group members team up on application-based upgrades or challenges from any location. That said, it can ensure an actual viable edge.
• Disaster recovery: Businesses of all sizes get the best support by implementing backup and recovery solutions taking less time and direct physical investment.

Challenges of Cloud Migration

There are plenty of challenges that the developers need to face. Some of the common challenges faced:

• Planning a cloud migration strategy
  IT professionals blindly adopt new technology into infrastructure without solid planning. The cloud is no exception. Always consider cost analysis, employee training, projected downtime, and an estimated time. There will be issues in fully migrating to the cloud for a long time.
• Breaking down cloud migration
  Cloud migration is focused on migrating the cloud at once. There will be a chance of error that can be responsible for erasing, corrupting, or unsecured your data. There are increased vulnerabilities of the business-critical or sensitive data.
• Overburdening financial cost
  Moving to the cloud turns out to be costly. Cloud turns out to be quite cost-effective in the long term. However, it’s worth noting that cloud migration might be expensive.
• Cloud security questions
  Security is preventing businesses from adopting the cloud. Cloud security serves as a smart approach to consider security. Usually, there is a chance of forgetting where your data will be stored, which becomes a major constraint.

Key Takeaways

Proper planning and selecting the right cloud migration approach will be the most favorable for your diverse IT assets. We are sure that through this specific article, you must have got the highlight on the best cloud migration strategies to create a path for migration and smoothly transitioning right to the cloud.