What is Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration refers to the transfer of data, applications, digital business processes, and workflows to cloud platforms. This can be a challenging process but can lead to increased efficiency and cost savings. After completing the digital migration, the company will need to decide how to use, maintain, optimize, and govern its cloud.

Benefits and Challenges

Benefits

• Managing the customer expectations better in order to keep them satisfied.
• Moving everything as a service will allow for more flexibility and efficiency.
• An increase in the demand for resources is easing.

Challenges

• Security weaknesses or failures in critical services could lead to serious problems for the organization.
• The company is lacking a clear business strategy and is not following through with its objectives.
• The new infrastructure is not easy to use and is prone to human error. This can lead to problems for users.

Cloud Migration Types

Rehosting (“Lift and Shift”) - Rehosting is the process of copying data and applications to the cloud platform without making any changes.

Replatforming – In Replatforming, you make some adjustments to the operating system and applications to make them more suitable for migrating to the cloud.

Repurchasing - Repurchasing means moving your data from one product to another. This can be switching from one cloud-based platform to another, or from an on-premise legacy system to a cloud-based platform.

Refactoring - Refactoring is a change-intensive process that often involves moving basic data and rebuilding applications from scratch in the new cloud platform.

Retiring - Retiring applications is more cost-effective because you aren't paying to maintain and transfer applications you no longer use. It is useful for companies that have old or obsolete applications still stored on their servers.

Retaining – Retaining means keeping some applications on-premises while migrating others to the cloud.

Cloud Migration Deployment Models

Public cloud - Public clouds are systems that allow users to access computing resources, like servers, from anywhere, using the internet.

Private cloud - The private cloud deployment model is where a single user has their own isolated environment, without the need for shared hardware.

Hybrid cloud – In hybrid cloud organizations can use a combination of two or more cloud deployment methods to move data and applications between different clouds.

Community cloud - Community clouds allow a group of organizations to share resources and systems so that they are available to everyone.

Cloud Migration Process

Planning and assessing – An organization needs to be aware of all the aspects of its environment in order to function effectively.

Design – Organization has to identify cloud-ready candidate applications, databases, storage, and physical and virtual servers and prepare contingency and roll-back plans to answer worst-case scenarios or undo the migration if needed.

Pilot migration – Address any potential problems that may have arisen during design. The organization has to create a team of experts to migrate its website to the new platform and provide training to help employees understand the changes.

Migrate - Migrate the data during a time when there will be minimal impact on system performance.

Conclusion

Cloud Migration is very common these days and many companies are embarking and going ahead with this. There are pros and cons to cloud migration but also there are solutions for it. It needs to be handled properly, if one follows the process everything can be handled properly.