Embracing the potential of the cloud has evolved into an unavoidable requirement for success in today’s digital realm, mainly as enterprises rapidly migrate to the cloud to fuel growth. By 2024, over forty-five percent of IT investment will move from traditional technology and solutions to the cloud. Knowing what cloud migration strategy is, how it may benefit your organization, and what it takes to make it happen can help you choose the best approach for a successful transfer to the cloud.
However, switching to the cloud is not an easy task. Many cloud efforts fail, and companies struggle to achieve the full benefit of their cloud expenditures if the transition is failed or messy and is not done correctly.
Continue exploring and reading to learn about the best approaches to migration into the cloud, and we will also deliberate the different types of cloud migration in 2024.
Table of Contents
What is a Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration is the process of partially or entirely shifting a company’s digital assets, products and services, databases, computer systems, and software to the cloud. Cloud migration additionally involves transitioning from one cloud to another.
Businesses looking to transition away from out-of-date and increasingly inefficient lasting impression infrastructures, such as aged servers or possibly unreliable firewall gadgets, or to abandon software or hardware options that no longer operate at peak capacity are increasingly migrating to the cloud to reap the many advantages of cloud computing. This is why so many firms are at least partially migrating to the cloud.
Also Read: Cloud Hosting Costs: Maximizing Value While Minimizing Costs
What is a Cloud Migration Strategy?
A cloud migration plan or strategy is a comprehensive plan for transitioning an organization’s electronic assets—including services, databases, IT assets, and applications—from physical or co-located infrastructure to a cloud-based environment. This procedure can be partial or complete, including the transition from one cloud service to another, often known as cloud-to-cloud migration.
A cloud migration plan is generally executed in five stages: planning, preparation, migration, operations, and optimization. This complex process does not just involve transferring data from local data centers to well-known public cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Azure; it may also include switching from one particular cloud service to another.
However, each firm’s path to the cloud is unique since there is no universal migration plan. Each IT asset being transferred is unique in terms of price, efficiency, and complexity. As a result, you cannot migrate every component to the cloud in a similar way. Furthermore, specific workloads might become eligible for relocation.
Creating a platform migration strategy assists in answering all of the concerns about what, how, and in the correct order to migrate these components. This is where a cloud migration plan comes into play. Try out Temok’s managed Magento cloud services in 2024!
Why Employ A Cloud Migration Strategy?
A cloud migration plan facilitates identifying and executing a swift, cost-effective move to the cloud. It helps determine which workloads require discontinuation, rewriting, or migration. Applications can migrate as-is or with enhancements to a suitable cloud platform. A business cloud migration plan will use various tactics to handle the complete application portfolio.
Because each organization’s cloud migration plan should be customized to meet its specific demands and accomplish the required business and technical goals, it necessitates understanding the business objectives and application portfolio, which may give insight into the TCO and ROI of a transfer.
What are the Different Types of Cloud Migration Strategies?
Here we will discuss the ‘7 Rs’ of a cloud migration plan from which you will have a clear idea of the best approaches to migration into the cloud:
Rehost
Assume you wish to migrate your local Oracle database to an EC2 instance located on AWS managed cloud with little effort. The Rehosting approach is for you! It’s one of the fastest and most straightforward cloud migration solutions because it requires no code changes.
Here’s how it operates: this “lift & shift” approach moves an organization’s data assets between physical premises and cloud infrastructure, which is particularly useful for large-scale migrations. Furthermore, it improves the cloud’s speed and performance while keeping costs low. Rehosting may be automated with migration solutions such as CloudEndure Migrations, AWS VM Import/Export, and AWS Database Migration services. However, manual implementation is still an option for achieving cloud maturity.
Relocation
The newly implemented cloud migration strategy includes moving workloads without disrupting existing operations, changing application source code, or purchasing new hardware. This technique enables a company to move a group of computers from a local platform, like Kubernetes or VMware, to a cloud version that utilizes the same platform. Managed Kubernetes services include Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).
Relocating reduces downtime and interruption since clients stay connected during the transfer process. Because this technique does not necessitate substantial changes in workload setup and architecture, there is no need to retrain employees or invest in new hardware, lowering operational costs. These cloud migration techniques make migration expenses more predictable by establishing defined scalability constraints.
Replatform
The ‘lift, tweak, and shift’ technique is an altered form of rehosting. Replatforming allows you to implement a few configuration modifications to your apps to better suit the circumstances of the cloud without affecting the basic design. Developers frequently use this strategy to modify how apps interface with databases so that they may operate on managed servers such as Google CloudSQL and Amazon RDS.
Replatforming is a version of lift and shift that entails making a few extra changes to optimize your environment for the cloud. Again, the basic architecture of programs remains the same. It is also an excellent tactic for conservative firms looking to create confidence in the cloud while gaining reimbursements such as better-quality system performance.
However, you must regularly examine your project to avoid total refactoring. The goal is to avoid making needless adjustments to address this danger.
Also Read: Cloud Based Server Cost: Tips For Budget Friendly Solutions
Repurchasing
Sometimes, legacy architecture components, such as internal customer relationship management or CRM systems, become complex and expensive, making scaling unfeasible. In such circumstances, it is advisable to migrate this capacity to an established cloud migration strategy, like Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM system.
It entails migrating your apps to a new, cloud-based solution, typically a SaaS platform (for example, from a CRM to Salesforce). The problem is to lose familiarity with the current code while training your staff on the brand-new platform. Even yet, repurchasing may be the most cost-effective alternative if you’re transitioning from a heavily customized legacy landscape.
Refactor/Re-architect
The Refactor or Re-architect, cloud migration strategy entails redesigning your apps from scratch to render them cloud-native. This method enables you to maximize the benefits of cloud-native technologies such as microservices design, serverless computing, service-based architecture, containers, function-as-a-service, and load-balancing systems.
When you migrate your digital assets from a traditional on-premise monolithic design to a completely serverless structure in the cloud, you may rework them. Try out Temok’s cheap managed WordPress cloud services in 2024!
These refactored apps are scalable, flexible, and efficient, delivering long-term cloud ROI even in the most aggressive sectors.
This method makes sense whenever programmers and executives agree to re-architect current code and frameworks. It enables the company to make full use of the cloud’s capabilities. Rebuilding a whole system from scratch requires time and resources. Refactoring is the most expensive method, but it is sure to produce handsome benefits in the long term.
Retain
If shifting to the cloud does not make sense for your firm now, you can keep your present environment and consider moving to the cloud later. To be compliant, you cannot move data at this time. Or, some of your apps may be too tough to move, and you wish to preserve them until you can find a suitable and cost-effective replacement.
In this instance, you might consider a hybrid solution in which part of your data remains on-premise while others are migrated to the cloud.
Some firms might not yet see the value in using the cloud. Are you reluctant to transfer data off-premises due to compliance concerns?
Perhaps you aren’t ready to give preference to a freshly improved app? In this instance, consider revisiting cloud computing at a later date. You should only move what is practical for your business during your cloud migration strategy.
Also Read: Managed Cloud Services: Unlocking The Business Success
Retiring
Large organizations frequently uncover infrastructure components that have grown outdated or will become irrelevant if migrated to the cloud. Such modules are not only unneeded, but they may also pose a security risk. In such circumstances, retiring specific components rather than migrating them to the cloud makes more sense. Retiring the suitable modules reduces expenses while increasing security.
This method comes in handy when terminating or shrinking old programs that are no longer backed by the vendor or usable in production, and the bother and price of transferring to the cloud might not prove beneficial. In such cases, business-critical operations running on inefficient outdated frameworks are safely terminated as a first step toward contemporary, cloud-native deployments.
Some of your programs and services may no longer be usable. There is no incentive to shift them to the cloud if they will not benefit your consumers. If this is the scenario, just turn them off.
What Are The Main Advantages Of Moving To The Cloud?
Here are some of the perks that motivate enterprises to shift assets to the public cloud:
- Scalability
Cloud computing is far more scalable than on-premises infrastructure, allowing for greater workloads and more users. To scale out commercial services, conventional IT infrastructures require organizations to acquire and install actual servers, software licenses, storage, and network equipment. Try out Temok’s best-managed Drupal cloud services in 2024!
- Cost
Cloud companies provide managed services, which reduce operating expenses and ease maintenance activities like upgrading. Companies that move to the cloud might spend much less on IT operations. They may commit more resources to innovation—creating new goods or upgrading old ones.
- Performance
Cloud migration strategy can boost performance and enhance the end-user experience. Cloud-hosted websites/apps can scale rapidly to accommodate more users, running in regions near users to minimize network latency.
- Disaster Recovery
It is crucial for all firms, but it has previously been prohibitively expensive for smaller ones. Today, the cloud assists more enterprises in implementing recovery and backup solutions that need less time and upfront costs.
- Security
The cloud provides more security than data centers since it centralizes critical data and apps. Cloud service providers deliver regular security upgrades, ensuring data protection and enabling focus on organizational priorities.
- Digital Experience
Users may access cloud data and services from any location, whether they are workers or customers. It helps to accelerate digital transformation, improves the customer experience, and offers staff current, adaptable tools. Try out Temok’s best and cheapest managed MySQL cloud services in 2024!
Conclusion
The best option for relocating, refactoring, rehosting, retaining, Replatforming, repurchasing, or retiring a program will be determined by its complexity and size, hardware requirements, scaling, and accessibility requirements, technical integration with the cloud’s infrastructure, and the company’s budget, among other factors. Don’t forget that Temok offers the best-managed cloud services, among others.
Cloud migration strategy is a complex process that necessitates a detailed examination of existing issues and mapping them to the necessary modifications to achieve business objectives. Migrations are selected based on workload complexity, expenses, and potential system disruption, varying across different solutions. Comment below your concerns about the cloud migration plan and get the best response from Temok’s dedicated professionals accordingly!
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Q#1 What Are The 7 Cloud Migration Strategies?
The 7 cloud migration strategies include relocating, refactoring, rehosting, retaining, Replatforming, repurchasing, and retiring.
Q#2 What Are The 6r Strategies For Cloud Migration?
The 6R strategies for cloud migration are:
- Rehost
- Re-platform
- Repurchase
- Retain
- Retire
- Refactor
Q#3 What Are The 3 Main Phases of a Cloud Migration?
Once you’ve decided that the cloud is the most effective choice for solving your business issues (which it may not be), you’ll go through three stages of cloud migration: planning, mid-shift, and go-live.