By Preethi Menon, VP & Head – Practices, Clover Infotech
A solid cloud strategy is key to scale businesses and stay in-line with your digital transformation objectives. This is when organizations start to migrate from on-premise systems to cloud technology. One of the most radical trends in enterprise IT in the recent years is cloud migration. The most sought migration approach includes moving to the public cloud, private cloud or hybrid cloud environments. Digital transformation is one of the major drivers of cloud adoption across the world.
The “Lift and Shift” process doesn’t happen overnight. Migrating existing workloads to the cloud may prove to be challenging. We have devised a 6-step approach for organizations to seamlessly migrate their workloads to the cloud, from planning their migration to optimizing it for better ROI. So, whether it’s a start-up, an SME, or a multi-national enterprise, if they are planning to move their workloads to the cloud, they should consider our 6-step cloud migration approach to achieve performance success in their cloud migration projects and benefit from secure cloud infrastructure and improved customer experience.
6-Step Approach to Cloud Migration
Pre-migration
1. Assess: First, you should be clear about the reasons why you’re moving to the cloud. The cloud offers many benefits, but you must be sure of the exact benefits that your organizations will achieve by moving your applications to the cloud. Understand digital business services end-to-end, and outside-in from the external customer’s perspective.
2. Plan: Not all apps are cloud friendly. Some perform better on private or hybrid clouds than on a public cloud. Some may need minor tweaking while others need in-depth code changes. Outline a plan comprising of which cloud model is right for your business. Ask yourself if you want to move all your data to the cloud, or does a hybrid model suit your needs better? A full analysis of the architecture, complexity and implementation is easier to do before the migration rather than after.
3. Prepare: Prepare your application & its infrastructure for the migration. Back up your data, execute a disaster recovery drill, and intimate the stakeholders about potential downtime and its impact on their processes. Ensure none of the business-critical applications are down before, during and post the migration.
Migration
4. Execute: How you migrate to the cloud will partially depend on the complexity and architecture of your application(s) and the architecture of your data. You can move your entire application over, run a test to see that it works, and then switch over your on-premises traffic. Alternatively, you can take a one-at-a-time approach, slowly moving data over, validating, and then continuing this process until all the data is moved to the cloud.
Post-Migration
5. Manage: To check the efficiency with which you use the cloud, you will have to conduct periodic monitoring. Understand, manage, observe, and analyse. Continuously monitor your new cloud environment and ensure that the user experience is still at, or above, acceptable levels and the applications are running seamlessly. Identify and fix any issues within the environment to ensure optimal performance.
6. Optimize: Organizations should spend the time following the migration to seek additional modernisation opportunities in order to optimize the cost and performance. Moving a few apps to the cloud may not lead to much ROI, but optimizing resources, data and your cloud subscription can lead to considerable value creation.
To conclude, cloud migration is the need of the hour as organizations adopt an agile and scalable business model. Organizations need to weigh the pros and cons of their migration method and act on it accordingly. Partnering with a cloud service provider could help ensure optimum utilization of their cost and resources. A step-by-step approach will also ensure that organizations leverage the investments they are making for cloud adoption and realize fruitful ROI.