What is Cloud Migration? Strategy, Process, and Tools

As such, the process requires careful analysis, planning and execution to ensure the cloud solution’s compatibility with your business requirements. This is why so many organizations are, at the very least, making a partial migration to the cloud. Cloud migration is the process of cloud data migration moving a company’s digital assets, services, databases, IT resources, and applications either partially, or wholly, into the cloud. We’re with you through every stage — from selecting which workloads to migrate, to ongoing management and optimization on your new cloud platform.

Learn how to use Linux on Azure, including guides for cloud-based enterprise Linux deployments and performance tips. A cloud strategy roadmap is a visual communication tool that describes how your organization will migrate to the cloud. Learn about the importance of a cloud roadmap in migration projects, questions you should ask when building your roadmap, and the five key sections of a cloud roadmap. One customer that leveraged Cloud Volumes ONTAP to make their Google Cloud migration a success was a Fortune-500 ranked global healthcare services and products company. Headquartered in the UK, the company has 50,000 employees serving hospitals, pharmacies, physicians, labs, and health systems worldwide.

Why migrate to the cloud?

In other words, how much time and money you can save from deploying and configuring components in the cloud compared to on-premise. Will system components become less expensive if you move from on-premises to the cloud? The association configurations of resources are retained during resource creation. You can use this framework to assess your organization’s readiness for
Google Cloud and what you need to do to fill in the gaps and develop new
competencies, as illustrated in the following diagram. An on-premises environment is an environment where you have full ownership and
responsibility.

Cloud migration process

In this phase, organizations look for ways to improve the performance and efficiency of their cloud environment. This can involve refining cloud operations, identifying opportunities for cost savings, and implementing cloud-native features or services to enhance performance. The optimization phase is ongoing, as organizations continually look for ways to improve their cloud operations and drive greater business value. Once workloads have been successfully migrated to the cloud, organizations enter the operate phase. This phase involves the management of workloads in the cloud environment, including monitoring performance, managing resources, and maintaining security and compliance. During this phase, organizations should continue to refine their operations based on feedback and performance data, making necessary adjustments to optimize cloud operations.

Cost Saving

Workload management alters significantly when an application moves to the cloud. Enterprises should calculate the cost of a cloud configuration before a migration to avoid unexpected surprises. IT staff needs to change their management processes to work as well in the cloud as they do locally. A solid strategy won’t completely eliminate all the hurdles and potential problems with a cloud migration. Sometimes IT leaders discover that their applications don’t work as well in the cloud as they did on premises. They need to determine the reasons for the cloud migration failure; it could be poor latency, concerns about security or perhaps compliance challenges.

Cloud migration process

Resolve key infrastructure and application dependencies, by prioritizing applications and identifying necessary remediations helping you reduce risk, time and cost. As an on-demand, self-service environment, cloud is now vital to achieving end-to-end digital transformation. Now, more than ever, cloud is vital to help businesses reopen, reinvent, and outmaneuver uncertainty. Understanding what cloud migration is, how it can benefit your business, and what is involved in making it happen, will help you decide on the best strategy to achieve a smooth transition to the cloud. Finalize the migration team, including both technical and business members, and establish activities around communication and training.

Multiple Cloud Storage Models

This will help to confirm which capabilities and activities are needed to execute effectively across the three main cloud migration steps. There are many questions to be answered along the way, and businesses of all sizes require assistance in making their cloud journeys. Map your entire environment, including dependencies, services, applications, and physical and virtual server configurations. Capture everything including shadow IT implementations and third-party resources that could complicate migration if not properly considered.

  • As such, the process requires careful analysis, planning and execution to ensure the cloud solution’s compatibility with your business requirements.
  • This makes it difficult to understand if migration was successful, from an economic point of view.
  • A
    public cloud environment
    has the advantage that you don’t have to manage the whole resource stack by
    yourself.
  • Although you’ve already done a lot to prevent accidental data losses, you may want to play it safe with critical data.

A migration plan must take into account all the workloads to be transferred to the cloud and the sequence for migrating them. A step-by-step approach can help with the success of migration by giving your team of implementers a chance to learn as they go along. Sometimes implementers choose a single workload to start a migration so they can test the process and assess the outcome.

Navigating the barriers to maximizing cloud value

By moving away from expensive, legacy infrastructure, you can realize instant savings on IT operations, as you move from a capex to an opex model. This lets you hold on to more cash or reinvest your capex budgets into business-critical initiatives. Even though the repetitive nature of the operations is going reduce by opting to cloud, many employees still find the processes to be confusing. This may change with time, but companies need to take initiatives and explain the benefits of making the switch to the cloud. Once you have finalized all the steps necessary to make the cloud migration, you can make the shift to the cloud. After a previously set deadline passes, make sure to check whether all the requirements are getting fulfilled with the help of KPIs.

Those providers offer all cloud models you might need and have convenient cost calculators to estimate the price of their services. LiquidPower migrated its SAP applications to the cloud without any disruption to the business. The move increased the company’s scalability, preparing it for future growth, while https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ also improving its ability to meet customer needs. Migration tools are necessary because they simplify and accelerate the migration process with minimal disruption to your day-to-day operations. Automated tools, specifically, are designed to remove the complexities of migration and speed the process.

What is Cloud Migration? Strategy, Process and Tools

These include centrally stored, subscription-based user applications catered as a service. As a first step to move to the cloud, you will need to understand the requirements and devise a plan to make the shift. As per your business requirements, moving to the cloud gives you the opportunity to opt for different service models such as SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, etc. Transform with AWS—leveraging our unmatched experience and proven solutions to drive success at every step of your migration and modernization journey. The platform the company chose was Cloud Volumes ONTAP, moving the data to Google Cloud while providing multicloud ease of use, multiprotocol file sharing, and persistent data storage for Kubernetes clusters.

Mitigation actions or plans for resolutions will also need to be put in place to ensure business continuity. The Cloud Migration process is an inevitable outcome of Cloud Computing. It has revolutionized the business world by facilitating easy access to data and software through any IoT (internet-connected) device. Moreover, it facilitates parts of the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), such as development and testing, without considering physical infrastructure. Where we are living with cloud technology, there the point cloud migration comes into the picture. So let’s know more about this cloud migration by going a little bit deep into this migration concept.

Key elements of a cloud migration plan

Choosing the cloud deployment model is one of the most crucial processes of cloud migration. You can either opt for a single cloud environment or a multi-cloud environment. You can opt for different types of cloud models such as private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, etc. as per your needs. A cloud adoption framework provides a baseline for organizations to use when mapping out their cloud migration journey.