Cloud migration can be a daunting task and if done without proper preparation, it can even turn painful. A minor mistake or a small missed step during the migration process can cause costly and time-consuming delays, outages, and disruptions.
However, despite the complexity of cloud migration, an ever-increasing number of enterprises and organizations view it as pivotal to their IT strategies because of the benefits that the cloud can offer. With today’s demand for new, disruptive solutions, businesses migrating to the cloud can reap many benefits.
This is also the reason why the market research firm, MarketsandMarkets, expects the cloud migration services market to grow up to USD 18.5 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 24.5%. This growing demand is driven by factors like lower costs, flexibility, agility, and security.
In case your organization is also looking at migrating some of your digital assets like data, workloads, or applications to public cloud infrastructure, then following a few best practices might help. In this article, we’ll discuss more about the same.
Table of Contents
Need for cloud migration
The main arguments for moving to the public cloud include not only the obvious benefits but also more nuanced reasons. Some of them are –
1. It can help businesses reduce costs by reducing the need for IT resources required for on-premise equipment.
2. It allows businesses to digitalize and optimize their operations by leveraging various digital technologies.
3. Cloud helps organizations focus on value by removing several time-consuming activities involved in managing IT infrastructure and platforms.
4. It can improve business agility by making businesses capable of quickly provisioning, de-provisioning, and scaling infrastructure as per specific project requirements.
Challenges with cloud migration
Some important challenges that organizations must bear in mind while migrating to the public cloud are –
1. Organizations need to minimize downtime while migrating. A single hour of downtime can cost as much as $100,000. So, it’s crucial to conduct cloud migration in such a way that the application disruption is minimized.
2. Security and compliance are also major challenges. With so many cases of data breaches happening, it becomes crucial for organizations to ensure that the data they move to the cloud is secure as well as compliant with relevant regulations.
3. Although cloud offers cost efficiency, the benefits are only as much as you make it. So, organizations need to avoid wasting cloud budget so it can reflect in budget savings.
4. There is a significant lack of skilled resources that can ensure a smooth cloud migration for businesses. This skill shortage means that not enough personnel are available for organizations, who can understand their IT security and simplify the migration process.
Cloud migration best practices
The following the below best practices, your organization can ensure that the cloud migration process is as smooth as possible –
Begin with a migration strategy
A migration strategy involves preparing clear business motives for the migration. The most advisable strategy is to begin with a pilot migration where you migrate in phases and start with the least critical workloads. When the pilot migration succeeds, it gives you confidence and experience to proceed with larger migration.
To create a migration strategy, organizations can focus on 5 Rs –
1. Rehost or the “lift and shift” strategy. It involves quick migration of business applications to the cloud for use case purposes.
2. Replatform or “lift, thinker, and share” strategy. It involves moving the databases to a managed database service in order to save on licensing costs and reduce operations overhead.
3. Repurchase or “drop and share” strategy. It involves shifting entirely from one product to another to leverage the latest features.
4. Refactoring or rearchitect strategy. It involves choosing to refactor entire applications to meet business needs.
5. Retire strategy. It involves getting rid of resources that are not used at all.
Create a governance framework
Creating a governance framework ensures that organizations have policy-based rules to prepare for secure cloud adoption in various business processes. The governance framework takes into account the risks of using third-party services and also documents organizational structures, objectives, roles, and responsibilities, etc.
Optimize cloud network
For some organizations, the public cloud can be too slow or not secure enough for their business goals. Therefore, it’s important to optimize the cloud network.
Many cloud providers like AWS and Azure offer a dedicated network connection to their infrastructure from company offices. Even if a dedicated network connection is not needed, it’s recommended to look for a better, faster service from your internet provider.
Upskilling your team
In order to deal with a lack of expertise in the company, it’s important to upskill your team on cloud migration. Through a series of training sessions, you must keep your employees up-to-date on the chosen cloud platforms so that these resources can come in handy during the migration process.
Manage software licensing
While creating your migration strategy, you must document all enterprise applications. It’s important to manage software licensing in the cloud. While some software come under the BYOD program, others have specific usage rights.
Implement automation
To reduce the chances of downtime during migration, you must implement automation in processes wherever possible. Automating repeated patterns can lower the risk of disruption and speed up cloud migration.
Monitor cloud usage
Monitoring cloud usage is important so that cloud budgets can be efficiently utilized. By monitoring usage, collecting logs, and identifying different services, you can ensure that various requirements are being met.
Leverage the expertise of cloud service provider
Instead of handling all issues in-house, it’s better to leverage the support and expertise of cloud service providers. Through their experience, they can simplify the cloud migration process for your organization.
Conclusion
Cloud migration offers numerous benefits to organizations. However, the process of migrating to the cloud can be a little tricky. By following the best practices shared in this article, your organization can ensure that the migration process is completed in a smooth and efficient manner.
In case you are looking for specific cloud migration software, then check out this page.
For any other details on various SaaS software, you can visit SaaSworthy.com
