Demystifying Cloud Migration: Tips and Best Practices
What is Cloud Migration?Businesses across industries are accelerating their digital transformation initiatives where ‘The Cloud’ plays a critical role. In other words, they are moving digital business operations into the cloud which involves moving them from a physical office to a virtual one. Be it applications, your company’s database or your workloads, organizations are constantly trying to gauge the benefits of cloud migration given the ever-changing dynamics of the business eco-systems.
Cloud migration however can attract hefty budgets and can be mind-boggling or at times, even intimidating. Harnessing the power of the cloud can be a major game changer for your company if you successfully unlock its right implementation. Overcoming its complexities and challenges needs demystifying the concept and its eventual process. Here are a few tips on how.
Demystifying cloud migration
1. Plan for migration with specific objectives and goals
Why do you want to migrate? Cost-cutting solutions, improved agility and a higher scalability rank at the top when assessed as to why companies look at migrating as a need. Set clear objectives that will help give wings to your vision.
2. Make an assessment of the current workload
Assess your existing infrastructure and other operations such as your routine machine data generated. Such exhaustive inventory of technologies, applications, number of users etc. is crucial data while planning the move. Full-stack clarity can provide greater detail during cloud migration planning. This in turn, helps you assess the magnitude of cloud transformation. Machine data analytics and metrics will also assist you at a later date to cross-reference your before and after scenarios.
3. Evaluate application performance
Base resources that run your applications like network, disk, storage etc., whether hosted on-site on later on cloud, need constant monitoring for understanding the overall health of your system. Collating and reviewing this information beforehand gives you a deeper insight once migration to the cloud has been accomplished. It helps review your over or under-performance in the new environment.
4. Validate and choose the right provider
Security of your applications and keeping your data safe and secure or in short, cloud security, is of prime importance during and after cloud migration. You can rely on machine data analytics that helps diagnose potential threats and vulnerabilities. Security threats like phishing, exfiltration or gaps like false positives, if detected, can be treated on-site, multi-cloud or in a hybrid cloud milieu too and can be carried forward into your cloud computing destination. Once this is accomplished, do take into account factors like compliance, data residency and support system offered while choosing the service provider. It will help to adhere to the ‘4Rs’ strategy - Re-Host, Re-Platform, Re-Factor and Replace.
5. Chalk out a migration strategy
Companies resort to ‘lift and shift’ approach as it seems faster and cost-cutting. However, failing to rationalize and modernize your application portfolio will lead to eventually losing out on cloud capabilities. Redundant applications that get migrated can lead to humongous data volume on the cloud, both difficult to manage and cost-elevating. Have some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) ready before you embark on the initiative. Be it scalability or flexibility that your company is aiming; make sure to evaluate your KPIs at regular intervals so ensure that the migration process has eventually made things better.
6. Begin small and then scale
Start small with low-risk applications or workloads to be able to fully explore the cloud-native features and its benefits. This will ensure that you gain enough experience with the cloud platform and will help you tackle challenges, if any, along the way. Redefine migration strategies accordingly based on this gained knowledge and smoothly handle complex migrations when you take bigger leaps later.
7. Optimize monitoring workloads
Data analytics and streaming signals generate valuable information about your users and stakeholders and they help you analyze customer behavior. Thanks to cloud technology, intercepting and acting on these crucial inputs gives you real-time insights and helps you stay competitive. This in turn, can be quite transformative for your business.
8. Explore Multi-Cloud
Multi-cloud strategy has today taken hold with companies employing a mix of three or more public and private cloud solutions. Seemingly unthinkable a few years ago, this trend has gained momentum where running production workloads on multiple clouds helps companies reap optimal benefits of the cloud computing model. Ensure date portability and interoperability by employing a universal data collation strategy that offers exhaustive visibility across your application environments.
9. Consistent optimization and innovation
Have robust safety measures in place when you are planning a migration strategy for protection of sensitive data. Have monitoring and governance practices in place for effective surveillance of the cloud environment. Optimize your workloads and infrastructure for optimal performance and perform a review of your cloud ambience, cost metrics etc. to tap areas for improvement and innovation.
