What Is Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration means moving your business operations to the cloud. Much like a physical relocation, it involves moving data, applications, and IT processes from data centers. Most of the time, cloud migration is defined as the shift from
on-premise or legacy infrastructure to the cloud.
Businesses decide to make this shift mainly to stay dynamic and constantly innovative. Legacy infrastructure is the hardware and software that is outdated but is still in use. If a business is running on a legacy system, there is the constant stress of falling behind the competition and a greater risk of a security breach.
What Is the Need for Cloud Migration?
Cloud computing has now evolved to become a corporate need, regardless of the firm's size or the scope of work they do. It enables cost savings, agility, and reliable IT resources. Companies can depend on the scalability of cloud storage to add storage as and when they need it, which increases their agility and lowers their total cost of ownership. They don’t have to worry about the maintenance of their private data centers that store information.
Some benefits of cloud migration are:
• Elastic scaling
• Enabling digital transformation
• High availability and reliability
• Faster
deployment
• Enhanced security
• Better cost management
“Understanding shared responsibilities will be critical in the use and distribution of workloads across multiple cloud environments.”
Brad Fugitt, Chief Information Security Officer, Pax8
The Most Common Issues Faced During Cloud Migration
When done wrong, cloud migration can turn out to be a painstaking task. The most common issues faced while migrating to the cloud are:
• Lacking a strategy determined by business objectives
• Cloud sprawl is caused due to a lack of clear understanding of the cloud environments
• Overdoing the planned budget
• Security weak points and critical service failures
• Unforeseen human errors and lack of skills
Hence, to avoid the issues mentioned above, it is essential that you incorporate a cloud migration checklist. This also helps the organization ensure that everyone within the organization is on the same page during the migration. Using a server migration checklist, you'd be able to keep an eye on the progress of your move.
Why Is Cloud Migration Checklist Important?
In today's environment,
hybrid technologies are growing in relevance with the movement of organizations to the cloud. Since digitalization is taking over, organizations need to focus on staying innovative. The process of migration, which is otherwise difficult, can be made easier by incorporating a simple and effective server migration checklist.
Once you have a cloud assessment checklist, you will have a clear understanding of how you should take up the whole migration process. When there is a checklist in place, a complete strategy can be used to get through the process quickly.
Cloud migration can be an easy process if you plan ahead of time. Betabrand's on-premise to cloud migration in 2017 went off without a hitch. They constructed many clusters in GKE and ran several test migrations before the actual migration. They discovered the right processes for a successful launch. Load testing is made easier with the cloud. Betabrand was able to swiftly establish a load testing duplicate of its production services. Tests showed sluggish code routes that would otherwise be hidden under large loads.
To ensure that your migration to the cloud is also as smooth as Betabrand’s, you should also look into some must-have steps for a cloud migration checklist:
Be Certain of Your Workload Priorities
It is a widely established best practice to choose workloads and data sets based on what would best fit your organizational requirements. Most often, workload migration priorities aren’t something that you can expect. Most of the time, the migration priorities would turn out to be weighted technical requirements that weren’t obvious or expected.
Cost Analysis
Cloud migration is an effective way to reduce hardware, software, and IT staffing expenses. However, sometimes legacy enterprise hardware would be more expensive to run as a cloud-based app, and hidden expenses can be an additional burden.
Selecting a Cloud Service Provider and a Cloud Environment
Choosing the right service provider and cloud environment is crucial for a cloud migration checklist. It is crucial to understand which service provider will be able to cater to your requirements. The top three service providers available in the market are AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. They have deployment models like
private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, and
multi-cloud.
Those who want to move to AWS and make the move less stressful can also follow an AWS migration checklist
For AWS cloud migration, they let you in on their checklist, which can be used to migrate to
Amazon Cloud.
The five-step AWS migration checklist is:
• Train your staff on cloud migration essentials
• Consider security needs and access management
• Set KPIs for cloud performance
• Plan for database migration
• Plan data migration for static websites and unstructured data
With this AWS migration planning, the whole process can be easily incorporated.
Conclusion
While moving to the cloud might seem like a difficult task, utilizing a practical application migration checklist would drastically ease the whole process. Once you have the checklist in place, you'd simply need to follow the list and easily get all your workload and data transferred to the cloud. Understanding what you need for your business from the cloud and determining the ideal cloud platform partner is the most crucial component of all.
FAQ
What Are the Main Phases of Cloud Migration?
The essential stages of cloud migration are:
• Analysis of technical and business needs
• Risk analysis and migration project scope
• Managed service operation
How Should One Plan Cloud Migration?
While planning a cloud migration, it is best to have a cloud migration checklist in place. Then, when you know what the crucial touchpoints are, the whole migration process can be done quickly and smoothly.
What Is Discovery in Cloud Migration?
The process of identifying and documenting infrastructure, and all its related components, relationships, and dependencies on the operating environm