In the post-Covid-19 era, businesses across the world are going through rapid reformations. Now, digitization is the first and the foremost aim for every business to scale, achieve success and stay ahead in the competition. Transforming to obtain a digital presence is crucial for businesses to expand and gain market attention.
Cloud migration is one of the effective ways to accelerate digital transformation.
Cloud computing is a disruptive technology that provides innovating and increasing business process efficiency and effectiveness. Further, moving to the cloud makes resource sharing seamless, boosts the agility of your business ecosystem, and scales computation and storage capacity as per the demand spikes. As a metered service, the cloud also helps to control initial capital investments. This article explains cloud migration, its different tactics, and how industry leaders are implementing cloud migration to embrace digital transformation.
According to IDC,
digitally transformed organizations are estimated to contribute more than half of the global GDP by 2023, valued at $53.3 trillion approximately. When a business transforms digitally, it enhances its proficiency, increases customer value, manages risk efficiently, and explores innovative scopes for revenue generation.
“Cloud computing is the third wave of the digital revolution.”
Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon
There are two ways you can adopt cloud for your business- cloud migration and modernization of applications.
Cloud Migration: A Significant Method to Fortify Digital Transformation
According to Flexera, 94% of the enterprises are using cloud services by now.
Cloud and digital transformation are correlated to each other. Migrating to the cloud from legacy infrastructure helps reform your business and opens the avenue towards seamless digital transformation. It brings in innovation and agility to attract market attention.
Cloud Migration is the process that shifts the workloads, data, and other applications from an on-premise server to the cloud server. It is also termed the "lift and shift" process, which moves explicit workloads and applications to the cloud server. This move leverages the cloud features such as automatic scaling, enhanced efficiency, prompt responsiveness, agile performance, robust security, storage, quick computation, and networking.
Vital Tactics for an Effective Cloud Migration
According to research conducted by Multisoft, primarily within start-ups and SMBs, the
advantages of cloud computing are instantaneous. Moreover, 80% of the surveyed companies report process enhancements within the first few months of adopting the cloud.
An effective migration strategy is the best way to enable business growth. It also empowers to stay aligned with the digitalization objectives. As a result, businesses are driven towards implementing their migration plan from on-premise to the cloud. The migration strategy is influenced by business vision, goals, and interests. According to Markets and Markets, the cloud migration services market is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 24.5% by 2022. To carry out a successful cloud migration efficiently and effectively, here are some crucial steps you can consider for an effective shift to the cloud.
Knowing Your Goal
It is critical to have a clear idea about your business goal before making your migration plan. Identifying the goal of shifting to the cloud is about the technology and the upliftment of the organization. Earlier, business and the supporting IT services used to work separately. But now, IT services and businesses work collaboratively because every business needs technical fortification. Otherwise, it would not be able to survive the competition. Adopting
cloud platforms is one of the effective ways to leverage the technology for your organization. In addition, it allows you to scale your efficiency by using tailored services automatically.
Strategizing the Shift
Before reaping the
benefits of cloud migration, it is crucial to plan out the shift. First, you should identify what you need to move. Determining the cloud-readiness of your current infrastructure and application is crucial. Next, consider the foundation metrics of your infrastructure to align workloads to your assets and applications. It will help you establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for migration, such as time for loading a page, response times, availability of the resources, CPU utilization, memory usage, and conversion rates. Strategizing your migration process has to be well-planned in a way that prioritizes your business objectives and considers the cost analysis pre and post shift.
Selecting the Right Migration Strategy
According to Unisys, one in three cloud migrations remains unsuccessful globally because the cloud is not a part of the core business strategy and is not planned correctly. Therefore, selecting the right migration strategy is one of the integral steps to attain business transformation. The 6Rs of migration strategy are- Rehosting, Replatforming, Repurchasing, Refactoring, Retiring, and Retaining. One of the critical reasons for a successful migration is to identify whether the applications that are supposed to be migrated are ready to perform and produce desired business value in the new environment. If not, then the migration can’t be considered a success.
Choosing the Ideal Platform
Digital transformation and cloud go hand-in-hand. It simply means cloud computing has become the basic foundation of the
technologies that enable digital transformation. As a result, based on your business requirement, you need to identify, select, and set the right cloud platform for your business. You need to decide if public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments are the right course of action for your needs. Further, deciding amongst eminent cloud vendors for your organization, such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform, is an integral step for a successful migration.
Making your Cloud Infrastructure Ready for the Shift
Once you decide on a specific platform for the migration, you need to make it ready to host the on-prem applications. Also, decide and select the suitable applications and cloud services for the new cloud platform. The major cloud services providers offer a wide range of choices that is close to the on-premises offerings. Further, some third-party service providers offer an amalgamation of on-premises and multi-cloud platforms, such as Databricks and Snowflake on AWS and Azure. The cloud platform and services you opt for will also decide the amount of code revision required to make the applications cloud-ready.
Emphasizing on Cloud Governance
Governance defines process, policy, and criteria for effective decision-making. It also helps to measure success, track milestone planning, and scope management. For successful mass application transformation to the cloud, defining a governance model will help to cover security, financial, performance, collaboration, and communication.
Defining Cloud KPI’s
While you strategize the migration plan of your business to the cloud, defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) helps you measure how the applications are performing against your expectations. It is crucial to understand that whether your pre-defined KPIs are accurate in the cloud environment. The best KPIs for a cloud migration reflect your migration status and identify any problems within your application. Further, it is ideal if your KPIs help you determine whether the migration is complete and successful.
Maintaining Security During Data Transfer
Understanding your organization's current security requirements, analyzing gaps, and establishing cloud security best practices leverages security controls offered by cloud providers and improves the security scenario based on application requirements. Aligning security with Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) framework provides essential security principles to control the overall security risks on a cloud platform and service model. It strengthens information security control, identifies consistent security threats and vulnerabilities in the cloud, and provides means to reduce it with standardized security and operational risk management.
Implementing the Movement
Once you follow all the steps meticulously, you’re ready for the shift. However, your migration tactics would depend on the complexity of your applications and infrastructure. Your strategy must also include the risk assessment that can arise due to operational disruption. However, the primary focus should be implementing the migration quickly with reduced cost and utilizing the benefits of cloud migration. To achieve it, you can shift your entire application and analyze how it functions. Otherwise, you can take a more granular approach by moving gradually until the entire application moves to the cloud.
How Spotify Moved to GCP to Become the Best Music Service in the World?
We all know about Spotify. Right? Spotify was founded in 2008, and today, it is the most significant market driver of the musical industry. Earlier, Spotify used legacy data centers to host their storage and infrastructure. However, the scaling requirements, and the growing competition of the audio streaming market, motivated Spotify to plan their cloud migration in 2016 to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). As a result, it migrated 1200 online services and data processing DAGs (directed acyclic graphs) and 20,000 tracks.
The three primary reasons for Spotify to migrate to GCP were to get instant and unlimited scaling facilities, work in collaboration, efficient problem-solving capacity, and innovative tools for big data processing.
The three primary reasons for Spotify to migrate to GCP were to get instant and unlimited scaling facilities, work in collaboration, efficient problem-solving capacity, and innovative tools for big data processing.
It was vital for Spotify to have a responsive product, which delivers customer satisfaction with advanced tools and features like recommendation, music discovery, and connecting people. Further, it also helps find new songs and podcasts and helps artists connect with fans and team up.
Today, Spotify has leveraged the role of cloud migration in digital transformation and has become the most popular global audio streaming service with 248m users, including 113m subscribers, across 79 markets. It is one of the key competitors of the music industry.
Final Thoughts
A cloud migration strategy needs t vigilant planning, assessment, and resourcing because there are a lot of dependencies on a migration process. However, a study by McAfee revealed that 97% of the businesses surveyed confirmed
using a cloud service in their daily operation. ,Therefore, business leaders will have to fundamentally develop a formal strategy to put individual cloud decisions to obtain enterprise’s strategic goals. Most importantly, it would be best to secure your business and operations from the very beginning to meet the business objectives. If your migration strategy ensures the security of the data and resources and leverages cutting-edge cloud computing technologies, then it is ideal to attain cloud digital transformation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Cloud Migration Plan?
A cloud migration plan is an organization's strategy to move its data and applications from on-premises architecture to the cloud. Unfortunately, not all workloads are cloud-ready nor can benefit from running on the cloud infrastructure, so it is crucial to plan out the most efficient way to select and migrate applications to the cloud.
What is the Right Time for Cloud Migration?
The perfect time to plan the movement to the cloud is whenever your legacy data center needs renewal, ideally when your hardware is three or more years old. The simple reason is that you can utilize the cost in cloud migration and get more benefits than replacing the hardware in your legacy data center.
Can Cloud Migration Help in Digital Transformation?
Cloud migration allows organizations to scale infrastructure capacities as needed to support changing business requirements. Further, it optimizes resource utilization and allows easy access to data from any location. It also helps in global expansion, with increased efficiency and improved decision-making powered by digital transformation.