Top 6 Key Elements for a Successful Cloud Applications Migration
Today, technology has the power to make or break the fortunes of virtually any business. With technological progress, business growth cycles have effectively been ramped up to astonishing degrees. So it has become imperative for businesses to use technology not just to ‘keep up with the Joneses’, but to have a true chance at survival and success. As growth cycles grow shorter and companies scale faster, the infrastructure also needs to evolve to service the growing needs of the organization. Traditional, on-premise infrastructure is simply proving too expensive and cumbersome for most businesses to scale at a time when it’s imperative for them to remain lean and agile.
This explains the popularity of Cloud Migration Solutions that offer businesses the scope to scale on demand (quite literally) as well as remain highly cost-effective. Currently, the global public cloud computing market is set to exceed $330 billion in 2020. More to the point, more than 90% of global enterprises are expected to rely on hybrid cloud by 2022, according to a March 2020 report. This is also borne out by the increased rate of application migration to the cloud as companies try to define their cloud adoption journey. Recent reports suggest that cloud spending is expected to hit $530 billion by 2021. The cloud migration services market is expected to reach USD 9.5 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 24.5%.
However, despite all the incredible benefits that cloud migration brings on board. Most companies are as yet unable to either adopt cloud fully or derive complete benefits from it. The problem is that adopting cloud is not just about migration to a set destination. It’s a journey that requires a complete transformation of your current infrastructure processes – including new ways of making, deploying, and managing applications & their performance. In reality, most on-premise tools & techniques may simply not work in the cloud. The need of the moment for companies is to recognize these realities to avoid unnecessary pains in the cloud migration process. Proper planning, execution, and testing are critical to the success of your cloud applications migration.
Benefits of migrating to the cloud
Running applications in the cloud can bring a host of benefits to any organization including but not limited to optimizing costs, scaling on demand, deploying innovations faster and even be more responsible environmentally. Cloud migration can help businesses to host applications and data in an IT environment that’s optimally positioned for cost, performance, and security. In fact, 75% of all cloud workloads and compute instances are projected to be SaaS by 2021. Gartner’s forecast predicts that the revenue from SaaS alone in 2021 will be nearly $113.1 billion.
Public cloud infrastructures also offer additional benefits, such as, greater elasticity, self-service provisioning, redundancy and most importantly, high quality infrastructure made available at a predictable, flexible, pay-per-use model. In a recent survey, sixty-eight percent of the CIOs ranked “migrating to the public cloud and/or expanding private cloud” as their top IT spend in 2020. Cloud Direct Connects could be a good place to start your migration journey.
Top 6 Key Elements for a Successful Cloud Migration:
- Develop a strategy
Before you even approach a migrations solutions provider, ask yourself the exact goals you want to accomplish through the migration process. Start by recording baseline metrics of your infrastructure so you can effectively map workloads to assets and applications. This can help you set up key performance indicators (KPIs) for the migration process. Business objectives should always take precedence over technology in devising your cloud migration strategy. Use the above metrics to track migration performance.
- Identify the right applications
While goals and objectives for cloud migration will vary from company to company – it is essential to pinpoint which applications require migration. Carefully evaluate your data and applications to identify dependencies. Some applications should stay in your data center, especially those that are business-critical, need low latency or have geographic constraints imposed by data security and privacy laws. Also if you are already heavily invested in infrastructure and software licensing, it may be worth a second glance to assess whether cloud migration costs will be worth the benefits in the long run.
- Secure the right cloud provider
Selecting the right cloud provider is crucial in ensuring the long-term success of your migration – during the transition and beyond. Carefully evaluate the tools made available by the provider, its expertise, ability to host public, private, and multi-cloud environments at any scale, ability to negotiate complex interdependencies in your infrastructure that may include inflexible architectures, or redundant technology and last, but not the least, level of support guaranteed by the provider during migration. Ideally, your SLAs should include milestone-based progress and results.
- Choose your cloud environment
Do you need to go single or multi-cloud?
A single cloud environment uses a single provider for all cloud migrations. Single cloud environments can use private or public clouds, depending on requirements. Most often, companies use single clouds for single service or application, including email servers, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) etc.
Multi-cloud environments make use of multiple different providers. They are used to service a mix of tasks with the intent of maximizing performance or reducing the scope of vendor lock-in. Different functions in your business may be suited to different cloud solutions to perform optimally.
Cloud services may take the form of:
- IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service)
- PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)
- SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)
- Cloud solutions can also cover Storage, Database, Information, Process, Application, Integration, Security, Management, Testing-as-a-service
- Determine the architecture
The architecture for the migration will depend on the kind of applications you want to migrate, and the necessary components should be decided based on the cloud environment you choose.
Keep in mind all the storage needs, computing power, content delivery etc.
- Execute your cloud migration
The way of cloud migration will be based on the complexity and architecture of your application(s) and data. You can migrate either in phases or completely (with a test run). Consider taking the help of Cloud Management Solutions for a hassle-free migration experience.
