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A beginners guide to cloud migration
2021-01-28 19:37:23| The Webmail Blog
A beginners guide to cloud migration nellmarie.colman Thu, 01/28/2021 - 12:37 Unless your business was born in the cloud, you likely rely on some IT applications or legacy infrastructure that you own, host or manage yourself. These systems may have fueled your growth in the past, but as you move toward newer technologies such as AI, machine learning and automation your legacy, non-cloud-based systems can hold you back. They simply arent built to take advantage of cloud native technologies. In this article, well work to set you on the right path to migrating your workloads, applications and processes to the cloud. Youll learn the basics about moving workloads to the cloud as well as how to still get value out of your legacy investments. Well also show you how to get help when you need it. In the end, youll be one step closer to transforming your business. What is cloud migration? A cloud migration is the process of moving digital assets including workloads, data and applications to a public or private cloud environment. It also involves decisions around how you plan to use, maintain, optimize and govern your cloud once the digital migration is complete. What are the benefits of cloud migration? The specific benefits of a cloud migration are closely tied to the benefits of the platform you choose. For example, if you migrate to a managed private cloud platform, youll experience substantial security and performance gains. And if you migrate to a public cloud platform, your benefits will center more around microservices and flexibility. But regardless of which platform you choose, moving from an on-premises environment to a hosted one will generally result in: Cost efficiency By moving away from expensive, legacy infrastructure, you can realize instant savings on IT operations, as you move from a capex to an opex model. This lets you hold on to more cash or reinvest your capex budgets into business-critical initiatives. Productivity improvements In the cloud, your IT can be freed of its operational burdens and turn its expertise toward building whats next. For end-users, the cloud provides enhanced functionality allowing them to do their jobs faster and more efficiently. Innovation enhancements Modernized cloud infrastructure gives your IT team greater agility so that they can deliver new functionality to users faster. Leveraging the cloud also allows them to implement cutting-edge technology like AI, IoT and machine learning to drive innovation. Attempting to execute such resource-intensive technologies on legacy hardware is not only expensive but, in some cases, impossible. Assessing your applications before migrating The first step in a cloud migration is workload selection. If your project is too large, youll likely face scope creep and long timeframes so start with a small, impactful workload and move on to increasingly complex workloads later, after youve gained some cloud migration experience. Use application profiling to gather and organize information about your workloads and applications. Follow these steps to assess and prioritize workloads for cloud migration: Audit your existing environments metrics around compute needs, performance output, response times and other factors important to business operations. This will help you establish a baseline and develop KPIs for the incoming platform. Itemize and collect key information about your workloads, such as physical and virtual server configurations, network topology, compliance requirements, data and application dependencies, geographic considerations and user needs. This will help you set requirements for selecting the right cloud platform to support your environment. Based on the audit and information gathering, categorize your workloads in order of migration complexity. Identify which workloads can be easily migrated without the need to replatform or refactor. Prioritize these easy-to-migrate workloads for cloud migration. What is the right cloud deployment model? Once youve identified your candidate workloads, align their requirements with their best-fit cloud platform. Though we refer to the cloud as a singular entity, there are multiple cloud types to consider. This is why assessing your applications and workloads is so critical. That effort will help you make informed cloud platform choices based on what you need and what the platform can provide. Public cloud. In a public cloud, infrastructure is shared by multiple businesses and owned and operated by a service provider. Because it allows you to easily scale resources up and down to meet demand and pay-as-you-go, its a great option for managing unpredictable traffic and maximizing cost savings. Private cloud. In a private cloud, infrastructure is dedicated entirely to your business. This gives you the ability to customize your compute, storage and networking and, as a result, achieve greater levels of control and security. Depending on your workload requirements and resource utilization, private cloud may also result in more cost savings than public cloud infrastructure. Hybrid cloud. Some workloads require a hybrid cloud that connects both public and private cloud environments. A hybrid cloud can give you the control of the private cloud for your sensitive, business-critical assets, plus the flexibility and cost savings of the public cloud for your public-facing operations. Multicloud. Basically, multicloud means what it sounds like: multiple clouds. From your on-premises data center and private clouds to hyperscale clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), cloud-based SaaS applications and even colocation environments it all comes together to create your unique multicloud. And the lines are starting to blur a bit between some of these definitions. With solutions like AWS Outposts, now you can bring a public hyperscale cloud into your own data center, on dedicated hardware. And you can run a private VMware Cloud on AWS. This just means you have more options to choose from, as you look for the right platform for your cloud migration. Choosing your cloud migration strategy After youve decided which workloads belong on which clouds, you need to select the best path for transitioning from here to there. An organization will likely use multiple migration strategies across workloads as there is no one-size-fits-all approach. For example, an organizations monolithic ERP system may use a lift-and-shift strategy for technical or licensing reasons, while an HR system is completely replaced by a SaaS option. There are six common cloud migration strategies for making the move: 1. Replace In this approach, you completely decommission and replace your existing legacy components with a cloud-based alternative. This creates a fast route to the cloud, but it requires a
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