What is cloud migration?
Cloud migration is the process of moving an organization’s applications—including data, services, processes and other business components—to a cloud computing environment. It typically involves transitioning these elements from on-premise data centers and servers to the cloud or from one cloud environment to another.
What are the business benefits of cloud migration?
By migrating some or all of its data assets to the cloud, an organization can achieve the following benefits:
- Cost savings. Reduce the cost of apps using a scalable and repeatable migration methodology delivered through a factory model; control costs using consumption-based pricing and eliminate capex-heavy on-premise environments.
- Speed. Improve time to market using an integrated DevOps pipeline with a layered cloud security model.
- Rationalized application portfolio. Identify applications suitable for cloud migration using a full-stack discovery and assessment methodology.
- Business transformation. Cloud migration solutions allow businesses to move and innovate faster, modernize aging infrastructure, scale globally, get better insights from data and restructure organizational models to create better customer experiences.
- Digital transformation. Achieve digital transformation by enhancing agility, enabling better use of advanced technologies and facilitating culture change.
- Data center consolidation. Spend less time managing data centers and more time running the business by migrating to the cloud.
- Agility and scalability. Use autoscaling and scalability to meet the organization’s peak demands without provisioning for excess capacity.
- Geographic reach. Access applications from any location, on any device, leveraging the connectivity backbone of cloud service providers (CSPs).
- Integration. Integrate with other systems (application programming interface) seamlessly—and cost-effectively with cloud migration solutions.
- Simplicity. Hasten and simplify the setup of data and applications and make updates automatic.
- Low maintenance. Turn responsibility over to a CSP for maintaining hardware, software and network infrastructure.
What are the biggest challenges in migrating to the cloud?
Migrating applications and data to the cloud is becoming a routine activity in the digital age—one that business and IT stakeholders can launch quickly, efficiently and effectively. However, in a highly fragmented market, enterprises may find it challenging to choose the best-suited cloud services, deployment models and workloads from the multitude of choices currently available.
Migrating to the cloud can be a cumbersome and risky exercise for traditional enterprises that have relied on legacy in-house systems to deliver services and revenue for years. Some typical challenges enterprises face when considering cloud migration solutions include:
- Deciding on the workloads to be moved and the order of migration.
- Maintaining the reliability and performance of business-critical services.
- Implementing appropriate levels of security controls and regulatory compliance.
What are typical approaches to cloud migration?
Among the cloud migration approaches are:
- Greenfield, which entails building applications on cloud with a “cloud-first” approach and ingesting cloud-native functionality
- Brownfield, which includes rehosting, replatforming, rearchitecting and refactoring
- A combination of Greenfield and Brownfield strategies
What is a successful framework for cloud migration?
A successful cloud migration framework is generally one that uses an agile methodology executed through scrum to divide the planning and execution of a cloud migration—as well as the ongoing management and optimization of the cloud—into a series of five strictly defined processes:
- Assess and Plan: Evaluates portfolios for cloud suitability and cloud migration viability
- Design and Build: Sets up a secure cloud environment based on workload requirements
- Vision and Strategy: Ensures alignment with business and IT strategies
- Migrate and Validate: Transitions workloads to the cloud environment
- Run and Optimize: Manages cloud- based systems, including service
Various accelerators—such as prebuilt cloud migration solution blueprints and patterns, migration tools, factory models, performance dashboards and governance frameworks, as well as integrated change management processes—power such a framework.
What is the typical timeline for migrating applications to the cloud?
With the right process, cloud migration can be effected in as little as 30 days, implementing a process that includes the following steps:
- Respond: Disruptions caused by the pandemic are forcing organizations across the globe to reexamine business continuity measures that minimize customer impact while keeping employees safe. Enterprises need to meet the expectations of an increasingly dispersed workforce and customer base.
- Recover: The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the shortcomings of on-premise infrastructure and legacy applications. Organizations have struggled with critical application failure and data center outages due to sudden spikes in demand. Cloud can help organizations build highly available, scalable, resilient IT infrastructure that can handle variable demand while reducing operating costs.
- Reimagine: The post-pandemic world will see accelerated adoption of digital technologies across all walks of life, changing the way businesses operate and redefining how companies engage with employees and customers. Cloud adoption will help organizations build new and flexible operating models to compete in this new normal by aligning modernization initiatives across platforms, applications and data.
