Cloud Migration Strategy: A methodology for cloud adoption

Welcome to the most crucial part of cloud adoption!

Nowadays, the success of most enterprises is associated with technology. As the business scale, so does the IT infrastructure needs. For such digital transformation, you need to develop a customized strategy including assessment of your readiness, planning for migration, migrating your workload or application and optimizing after migrating on the cloud. These steps should be given the utmost importance.

Migration is the stage where you move data, applications and other business elements to the cloud environment. This is the stage where you actually start leveraging the cloud as a technological update to your IT infrastructure. Finally moving your workloads to the cloud after exhaustive assessment and detailed planning makes this stage the most crucial. That was a no-brainer, isn’t it?

This stage is not about planning anything instead you really (we mean really) have to get to work from this point. Most organizations classify phases of cloud adoption strategy as: before migration, during migration, and after migration. These phases further classified into how we have drilled down our “Cloud Adoption Series”: Assessment, Planning, Migration and Optimize.

Migration is a transition from on-premise infrastructure to a cloud environment. You can follow certain strategies to easily migrate on the cloud. But before we elaborate about strategies, we want you to briefly consider the following steps:

1. Revisit your assessment sheet:

If you need to make any amendments, you can make it now. This will help you to reassure that you have aligned all your cloud objectives with business strategy and not missed anything.

2. Planning Execution:

You won’t be able to start migration before executing all your planning steps. All the steps:  gathering a skillful team, selecting which workload to deploy, selecting a cloud vendor, and testing a beta project, needs to be executed from start to end.

3. Migrate:

You can start implementing a suitable strategy for migration. If you have put enough effort into assessment and planning cloud adoption, the actual migration process will go smoothly and quickly.

The above mentioned are must-follow steps that you need to include in your migration stage. Oh, wait! This doesn’t solve all your migration queries. We do not want to leave any loose end in the most crucial part of a cloud adoption strategy. So, here are two most focused key areas during migration:

Security during migration

If you think that security in the cloud is paramount, then it is during migration as well. In other words, you might have ensured that your cloud is secured but what about the security measures to be taken while moving a workload to the cloud. For instance, if you are using temporary storage for sensitive information then it should be as secure as your end storage in the cloud.

Know your tools

Your cloud provider might have given you tools like AWS provides Migration Hub etc. So, in an organization, the technical team should know these tools very well because moving workload to the cloud can be tricky.

6R Migration Strategies

Now, clearly, we can move on the “6R Migration Strategies”. Here you can find why different scenarios adopt different strategies for cloud migration:

1. Rehost (“lift and shift”)

When organizations quickly want to migrate to the cloud with very little or no modification, they tend to follow this approach. If you know what you are doing and have a green signal from all your technical executives, your business can scale at a rapid pace.

2. Re-platform (“lift, tinker and shift”)

This requires a few modifications to achieve minor benefits but not changing anything in core architecture. Few modifications like moving to relational database service if you are unable to manage database instances.

3. Repurchase

This includes purchasing new products or services to incorporate a few changes in cloud architecture. This migration strategy can be implemented if you are already on the cloud and want to transit significant workloads.

4. Refactor or Rearchitect

Strong business needs to add new features or scale that can drive this strategy. This strategy is worth pursuing if you want to boost agility and maintain business. But not to forget that this can be the most expensive solution.

5. Retire:

Identify the resources or IT assets that you don’t require and can be turned off without impacting the migration process, is the main approach to this strategy. This implies that with time you may want to completely dump these assets after figuring out that these don’t have future needs to fulfill.

6. Retain:

This strategy can be aligned with other strategies also to achieve an optimal solution. If you have clearly identified the required resources and planned out to acquire those ones by one, you need to at least look out what you already have. You can retain your IT assets. The retention of assets obviously saves your money, is also helpful if you are not ready to migrate all your applications and data.

If an organization can surpass this migration stage smoothly, there’s no stopping them from gaining value out of their cloud. In fact, even if you have few setbacks that are not too significant, you can experience how to tackle those which eventually lead to future contentment.

All these error remediations and monitoring are included in the final stage of strategy i.e. Optimization.

So stay tuned for the last key to ultimate cloud experience….

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