Businesses worldwide are replacing legacy, on-premise technology with scalable, flexible & cost-effective cloud computing power. From reducing IT costs to enhancing agility & accelerating innovation, cloud migration is becoming a pressing requirement. A cloud migration strategy helps an organization move its data and applications from on-premises architecture to the cloud or across cloud environments. However, making the transition requires professional help with practical strategy & technical specialization.
Through this blog, we’ll provide you with a better understanding of 6R of a cloud migration strategy, best practices & benefits it can offer for your investments. So, let’s get started!
It refers to the process of moving an organization’s digital assets, including IT resources, data, workloads, or applications, partially or wholly, to the cloud. It is essential for organizations moving their legacy systems to the cloud for the first time, or cloud users looking for investment optimization. And this process impacts all aspects of the organization, including people, processes & technology.
Listed below are the crucial benefits that compel organizations of any size to migrate their resources to the public cloud.
Popularly known as the six R’s of migration strategies, they help answer all questions about how to move IT assets to the cloud. Today, they are the fundamental guideline for almost any Cloud transformation. Let’s take a deep dive into each element of the migration strategy.
Commonly referred to as lift and shift pattern, rehosting involves using the infrastructure. It transfers data assets from on-premises to cloud infrastructure. Further, it can be automated using tools like CloudEndure Migration and AWS VM Import/Export, but it also works with manual implementation to gain maturity.
When to consider;
AdvancedMD, a medical professional software platform, handles highly sensitive, protected patient data. It was being spun off from its parent company, ADP, and had to move all its data out of ADP’s data center. They migrated from on-premises to Cloud with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
Also called as Lift, Tinker, and Shift strategy, it helps to make configurational changes to the apps that better suit the cloud environment without changing its core architecture. The development teams apply this approach to change how apps interact with the database to run effectively on managed platforms like Amazon RDS.
When to consider;
Evernote, a notetaking and task management application, leveraged a re-platform strategy when it needed an infrastructure solution to scale for user traffic with speed, reliability & disaster recovery. They used a phased approach & migrated 5 billion notes & attachments from a private cloud to a Google Cloud Platform in 70 days.
Popular as a drop-and-shop strategy, it replaces the existing on-premise application with a cloud-native vendor-packaged software. It can be referred to as moving to SaaS (Software as a Service) application with the same capabilities. It entails making licensing changes – you can start a new license agreement with the cloud provider for their solution and discard the existing on-premise license. For instance, it is moving from the in-house CRM system to Salesforce or Hubspot. The newer, upgraded version would offer a better value coupled with higher efficiency, savings (on app storage) & even maintenance costs.
When to consider;
Airbnb, a community marketplace for property owners and travelers worldwide, utilizes the company’s website & iOS & Android mobile apps for users’ activities. Due to service administration issues, they migrated cloud computing functions from their original provider to AWS. It helped them save the expense of at least one operation and provided more flexibility & simplicity.
Rearchitect or refactor strategy involves rewriting the applications from scratch to make them compatible with the cloud environment. It is usually for the apps that demand thorough modernization, including features, scalability, and performance, and cannot be achieved through minor changes to the existing architecture. It allows you to leverage the full potential of cloud-native technologies such as serverless, microservices architecture, function-as-a-service, containers, and load balancers. This approach is the most expensive, resource-intensive, and time-consuming compared to the others in the list, yet it would prove the worthiest in the long run.
When to consider;
State Auto, a property and casualty insurer in the US, used a traditional three-tier architecture & experienced slow production on existing systems. They built a cloud-native application on AWS and cut production time to a day. AWS helped them improve the user experience & foster a culture of innovation.
It can be considered a passive strategy as there’s no natural movement. With this approach, you get rid of applications that are; 1) no longer needed, 2) are not productive for the organization’s IT portfolio. For instance, if an application is considered not worthy of migration, it can either be eliminated or downsized. It further allows assessing all the applications in terms of their uses, dependencies & cost to the company.
When to consider;
Autodesk, a 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software leader, collaborated with AWS to transform from a data center/cloud hybrid model to a cloud-first one. They retired 209 application environments to improve security& UX. Migration & modernization helped achieve reduced costs & increased efficiency.
This strategy focuses on revisiting critical applications or sections of your digital assets that need significant refactoring before the migration. Some apps aren’t ready for cloud shifting due to technical, compliance, security, or cost-effective reasons. So, enterprises might implement a hybrid or part migration strategy to retain the assets.
When to consider;
Johnson and Johnson deployed a hybrid cloud strategy by running critical workloads on AWS & some legacy applications on their data centers. It helped them automate IT, reduce the footprint of physical servers & gain business efficiency.
Team up with us to make your migration & adoption seamless to maximize value and mitigate risks.
Each project has a unique set of drivers and requirements. And based on our experience, listed below are the few steps that are pre-requisite for any project. As part of it, there are several factors & parameters to consider, including workload prioritization, pilot development, testing, and strategy alignment.
Here are some of the best practices;
We’ve extensive experience in moving data & applications using Amazon Web Services (AWS) & Microsoft Azure.
Selecting the right partner plays a vital role in your organization’s success. And we can work with you every step of the way. As an experienced cloud development company, we cater to businesses of all sizes and across geographies. Our team combines their strong technical knowledge with holistic strategies to support you with migrating your applications & workloads to virtualized environments or refactoring them for more efficient utilization of cloud-native services. We can develop custom cloud applications & even deploy them in public, private, or hybrid environments for you.
Here are two use cases from our experience.
An Australian EdTech company wanted to expand its presence. They wanted to modernize their web-based eLearning platform with new features, simple learning delivery processes & the right insights for teachers & parents.
We revamped it to a fully responsive cloud-based e-learning platform. With cloud scalability as the priority, our team consulted to utilize MS Azure as the cloud computing platform. This migration helped them better leverage Microsoft’s ecosystem capabilities.
The solution included features like:
Key takeaways;
A France-based leading outdoor advertising company wanted to streamline & upgrade its legacy ad inventory system. It had time-consuming & costly manual processes across multiple disparate systems.
We re-engineered the software to track, select & deliver ad placement orders based on their live status across diverse regions. Our team recommended the AWS platform for networking, storage & computing. The revamped platform has many microservices on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.
The solution included features like:
Key takeaways;
Cloud migration is complex, but it doesn’t have to be with the proper knowledge and direction. These strategies aren’t definitive but surefire ways to get started with migration planning. The selection of approaches also depends on which model you choose or have in place for your organization. Your plan can combine some of these strategies or include all of them.
By working with a cloud migration services provider, decide what suits your needs, create a structured framework, and execute your action plan. They can help account for the challenges before confidently developing your migratory plan.
We can copilot your journey with the exemplary architecture in place and solutions that meet your strategic business needs.