Category: Cloud Services

Top 8 tips to master cloud migration

With the constant and rapid changes happening in industries, organizations need to adapt quickly to the changes, be flexible to customer demands, and continuously stay ahead of the competition.

Most of the organizations are considering modernizing critical applications by migrating to the cloud. Every product that comes to the market today assures speed, efficiency and cost savings, and so it becomes imperative for businesses to cope up with this to stay ahead in the competition. Introducing the new system to your existing one needs to have practical considerations like moving the critical data from one system to another, looking to improve in-house skills, etc. This white paper Eight tips for mastering migration explains in detail how successfully an organization can migrate to the cloud.

A successful migration is the outcome of a well-defined approach that streamlines and accelerates the cloud migration journey. Various cloud providers are offering open-source, cloud-based, and automated tools and services.

Using solutions like Carbonite allows you to easily migrate physical, virtual, and cloud workloads to and from any environment with minimal risk and near-zero downtime. It helps in protecting personal and business data from common forms of data loss.

This post summarizes the eight tips on mastering the cloud migration process mentioned in the above white paper.

  • Analysing Cost of Downtime–

Any kind of downtime leads to significant costs with far-reaching impact on the business. Evaluating the cost of downtime depends on various factors.  Most of the businesses fail to do this even after experiencing it. A business needs to consider the cost of the problem before considering how much the fix is going to cost.

  • Use the right migration tool –

Migration tools used by most of the public service providers are often platform-dependent, engineered for one type of migration scenario only. A good migration tool offers flexibility and durability for mission-critical systems and data subject to regulatory compliance.

  • Outline your migration process –

Planning is a crucial part of migrating to the cloud. Though you have a well-defined plan for the pre-migration process, still you may fail in the migration process due to an improper post-migration plan.

  • Organize your workloads –

With a huge number of workloads, migration may become difficult. Depending on the size of the project, it is important to organize the workloads into groups based on the criticality, difficulty, performance, and more.

  • Perform automated and continuous testing-

Testing is very important for successful migration as it helps in assessing the success and failure of the operations.

  • Hire the right service provider –

An expert service provider can help in meeting your migration needs, minimize risks of migration failures, and help in reducing the costs.

  • Long term vision –

Have a long term goal while planning for your migration journey. Invest in tools and methodologies that can help in the present as well as future projects.

  • Utilize the migration to the maximum –

While considering migration for your business, assess your business continuity plans. See to it that the migration provides optimal coverage of new as well as old systems.

These tips can help your organization to avoid the common problems and migrate successfully to the cloud. AgilizTech cloud experts can offer expert consultation and create a roadmap for all your cloud migration requirements.

5 Key Considerations for Cloud Migration

Migrating your organization’s IT workload to cloud is a crucial decision and immediately alters the way you operate the business. With the current pandemic bringing changes at an increasing pace, we are forced to make quick decisions and this has accelerated the need for cloud migration for many companies.

Cloud migration being a complex process, before the migration lot of things need to be calculated like:

  • Which cloud service providers best meet your needs?
  • How would you calculate the cost of cloud migration and operation?
  • How to ensure service continuity during and after the move?
  • What kind of security measures should be taken and how to be prepared?

 

There are several key considerations that businesses must think about while planning for cloud migration, but we will discuss 5 significant considerations that need to be considered before migrating to the cloud:

Infrastructure assessment

Your organization should assess its readiness before cloud migration and this requires few preparations like outlining cloud migration plan, training the employees on operating the cloud environment, ensuring applications and processes are compatible with cloud, and have the right security protocols in place.

Cloud workload analysis

While migrating workloads to the cloud, some may not be appropriate to move. Before migrating, you need to ensure up-to-date versions of the operating system and database. Systems that are phased out or nearing expiry will not be supported by the Cloud Service Providers.

Disaster recovery and back up policies

Organizations need to be prepared for any kind of disaster be it hardware failures, cyber-attacks, or natural calamities. Business continuity in times of disasters depends largely on the ability to replicate the systems and data. Hence, organizations need to evaluate their back up policies and ways to map them with their Cloud Service Providers.

Data security

Migrating your data and storing it in the cloud needs to be safe and secure. While data is being transitioned from one system to the other you need to ensure that it is properly secured. Organizations should coordinate with the service providers for the implementation of well-defined security policies.

Access to Cloud service

Access to the data and applications by your users will change once migrated to the cloud. Hence, at the time of the cloud migration planning phase, the user experience impact needs to be assessed and considered.

Embrace the right Cloud Migration journey for your organization

These are just a few of the important things that must be considered before you migrate to the cloud. For a successful cloud migration, an organization needs to have an elaborate cloud migration strategy and definite business goals. Cloud migration when implemented in a phased manner minimizes the impact on the existing customers of the organization.

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, social distancing measures were put in place with most of the workforce being forced to work from home. As most of the organizations were not prepared for this situation, this is when cloud automation platforms helped the most.

How choosing the right cloud platform (Public, Private, or Hybrid) is essential, similarly selecting the right Cloud Service Provider is also equally important. With a competent cloud team, AgilizTech can help you in implementing the right cloud infrastructure and hosting environment ensuring benefits like flexibility, scalability, data redundancy, enhanced availability, cost efficiency among others.

 

5R Strategy for Cloud Migration

Cloud migration offers immense benefits to organizations and to name a few are scalability, cost-effectiveness, and increased performance. In this post learn about the strategy built upon 5R which can be implemented by organizations to migrate applications to the cloud.

Gartner, a highly influential information technology research company, describes 5 options for organizations migrating to the cloud. These cloud migration strategies are commonly known as the “5 R’s”.

Developing a Migration strategy

Organizations should not miss out on the opportunity to modernize considering today’s IT ecosystem.  The cloud migration strategy adopted by your organization is the vision of how to move your applications to the cloud.

Every organization has different business requirements and hence will follow a slightly different process in cloud migration. They need to decipher what is in their environment, what are the interdependencies, what is going to be easy and hard to migrate, and how they’ll migrate each application.

Organizations must have a proper plan and approach to migrate each of their application and in what order to do it. A successful strategy will maximize your value from cloud infrastructure while minimizing migration time, effort, cost, and risk.

Let us understand the 5R strategy to migrate applications to cloud:

1. Rehost

Rehost or the Lift and Shift approach. Rehosting is a process of moving your applications from on-premises to cloud environments without modification. This strategy involves minimal risk and effort. It also reduces infrastructure and operating costs. This will benefit the organization in the long-term as it will encourage a cloud-first approach for the company and develop skills within the business.

AWS VM Import/Export, Racemi are few of the tools with which rehosting can be automated.

2. Re platform

Replatform or the Lift Tinker and Shift method which involves moving the applications as it is, with a small amount of up versioning. In this strategy, few optimizations are made before migrating to the cloud, like switching from self-hosted infrastructure to managed services and switching from commercial software to open source.

You may minimize the amount of time you spend managing database instances by migrating to a database-as-a-service platform like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), or migrating your application to a fully managed platform like Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.

3. Refactor

Refactor or rearchitect is a method of transforming non-cloud application into a cloud-native application. It calls for a complete overhaul of an application to adapt it to the cloud. Organizations looking to modify their applications and infrastructure from a monolithic architecture to a service-oriented (or server-less) architecture can use this strategy to boost agility or improve business continuity and maximize operational cost efficiency in the cloud.

4. Retire

While migrating a project to the cloud you might identify applications that are redundant and closing them down can save you on costs. The savings will ultimately enhance the business case, direct your team’s scarce attention to the things that people use, and lower the surface area you must secure.

5. Retain

When a business has highly invested in on-premise applications, or currently has active development projects, or have applications that require high performance, existing applications are working well, organizations that need to comply with strict regulations where the data is on-premise, in such conditions they should migrate when it is required too, otherwise retaining applications on-premise seems a better option.

AgilizTech cloud solution experts can offer a structured 5R migration strategy that can smoothly integrate with any kind of cloud deployment – be it public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud.

Learn more on Cloud Migration 

I hope this post has given you an understanding of what is 5R cloud migration strategy and you can come to a decision on migrating to the cloud only after careful analysis. We are there to answer all your queries.

 

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