Defining your cloud migration strategy
Having a robust IT infrastructure strategy is critical in helping companies improve efficiency, productivity and maintain competitive advantage, and this has only been reinforced by the pandemic. As organisations strive to digitally transform, they need to provide a solid infrastructural foundation and essential connections upon which the business depends.
As a result, the cloud migration services market is rapidly growing and forecasted to reach over $448 billion by 2026 as companies are opting to move their infrastructure to private or public cloud, typically as part of a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud strategy. However, whilst cloud migration can offer enormous benefits, it can also present its challenges if not thought through carefully.
What is cloud migration?
Cloud migration is the process of moving data, databases, applications, physical storage or other business elements either partially or wholly to a cloud computing environment. Most often, cloud migration refers to the move of legacy, on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud. However, it could also mean moving from one cloud to another cloud.
For many, a move to the cloud can be overwhelming. Using a trusted partner for your cloud migration project can help you reduce IT costs, scale more quickly, provide a better customer experience and peace of mind
What are the benefits of cloud migration?
There are several reasons for cloud migration including security, particularly if moving from an on-premise environment. Traditional legacy infrastructure rarely offers the level of flexibility and connectivity needed to enable digital transformation and maintain competitive advantage.
Top benefits of migrating to the cloud include:
- Scalability: Migrating to the cloud provides organisations with the opportunity to scale up and down infrastructure depending on the current needs. Organisations can expand capacity easily, improving not only resilience but their ability to adapt better and faster to fluctuating market conditions.
- Cost savings: By migrating operations to the cloud, businesses can save substantial capital costs through a reduction in spending on equipment, infrastructure and software. There are no extra costs to access additional processing power and savings can be made with better energy efficiency. Businesses can also facilitate and support growth without expensive changes to existing legacy systems.
- User experience: Cloud enables companies and employees to access and process data and resources quickly and securely from anywhere in the world, offering greater flexibility and sparking better collaboration.
- Resilience: Migrating to the cloud can provide greater resilience, particularly if adopting a hybrid or private cloud model underpinned by a colocation data centre. Data centres, like Telehouse, guarantee high levels of uptime and availability and back up should a disaster strike.
- Security: Cloud infrastructure often provides higher levels of security than on a typical on-premise IT architecture. With strong access controls and security intelligence, migrating to cloud relieves many businesses of the security headache, updates and costs they face on-premise. Organisations can also build their compliance considerations into migrations during planning.
- Sustainability: Thecloud is considered more sustainable than traditional IT approaches, particularly if organisations are accessing the cloud through a data centre powered by renewable energy like Telehouse. Businesses migrating to the cloud can benefit from better energy efficiency and reduced carbon footprint which can help meet sustainability goals.
Different cloud migration strategies
Migrating to the cloud opens the doors to an array of benefits, however, success will depend on having the right migration strategy in place to make the transition as smooth and as seamless as possible. There are a number of different types of strategies for cloud migration. Depending on your needs and environment, you can mix and match them to give you the biggest value.
- Rehost: Also known as ‘lift and shift’, this is a very quick and popular strategy for initial migrations which involves moving existing applications without implementing any prior changes. Rehosting might lead businesses to re-architect in the future, once a cloud-based operation is in place.
- Re-platform: Referred to as ‘lift, tinker and shift’, this strategy requires a few small cloud optimisations. This is a perfect approach for well-established organisations with structured legacy IT systems to make applications more compatible with modern day cloud technologies.
- Repurchase: Moving from perpetual licenses to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, for example moving from a CRM to Salesforce.com. Excellent and fast strategy to help companies manage operations more efficiently in the cloud.
- Refactor (or re-architect): Often the most expensive strategy, it needs the most enhancements and is normally executed after an initial migration via one of the other approaches. Re-architecting of applications is driven by the business’ need to scale up to boost agility and overall productivity.
- Revisit (or retain): Keeping applications that are critical for the business but that require major refactoring before migration.
- Retire: Removing applications that are no longer needed. As much as 10-20% of the IT portfolio becomes irrelevant after moving to a cloud platform. Determining what can be retired will help reduce the number of applications you need to secure and save money.
A 4-step cloud migration process
Every organisation’s journey to the cloud will be unique depending on objectives, resource allocations, and integrations with other services. However, every successful cloud migration involves these key phases:
- Migration planning
Before beginning a migration, it is important to map out a detailed strategy. This starts with identifying the size and constraints of the migration as well as the specific needs of the business. Organisations should conduct a thorough inventory of assets before deciding what to migrate, establishing a realistic timeline and budget. This will ensure minimal disruption and business continuity during the migration.
- Choosing the right cloud provider
Depending on the asset inventory and requirements, organisations must now choose a cloud provider that will best suit their needs and maximise the benefits of cloud. Things to consider include security, compliance, manageability, service levels and support. Each provider will also have its own pricing model so organisations need to ensure they understand all the options before making a decision.
- Migrating data to the cloud
Once the cloud migration strategy and provider are chosen, it’s time to do the job and move your assets to the cloud. This needs to be done with minimal disruption to business operations and is the reason why many companies turn to third party support. Key to success will be agile application debugging and testing. Any challenges that may come up during the migration need to be quickly rectified.
- Validating post-move success
Data validation is an essential step while managing the cloud migration process. Each individual workload should be proven to work in the new environment before migrating another. By building in comprehensive checks organisations can be confident their new cloud environment will operate effectively and deliver anticipated benefits.
Cloud and data centre migration with Telehouse
Migrating critical IT infrastructure to the cloud can be a complex and time-consuming exercise, but it doesn’t have to be. At Telehouse, we provide secure, reliable and fast cloud connectivity services to leading organisations worldwide through our global network of interconnected data centres.
To help our customers with their journey to the cloud, Telehouse provides:
- Full data centre migration services including expertise in the auditing, planning, and migration phases.
- Access to our Cloud Link multi-cloud connectivity exchange, enabling customers to connect to multiple cloud services easily and securely through a single, dedicated private connection.
- Fast, secure and direct connections between on-premises systems and applications hosted in public, private or hybrid clouds.
- Private connections to major public cloud providers through Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute or Amazon Web Services Direct Connect.
To find out more, get in touch at:
T: +44 (0) 20 7512 0550 E: sales@uk.telehouse.net