The Essential Guide to Cloud Migration Strategy

In today's digital era, success is increasingly demanded as more companies move their operations to the cloud, driving rapid growth. However, migrating to the cloud is a complex process. Organizations sometimes undergo financial loss if the migration is not done methodically.

According to the survey conducted by Gartner, 45% of IT spending on system infrastructure, application infrastructure, and business processes will shift to the cloud by 2024.  

Here is another interesting stat on cloud migration.

The current valuation of the Cloud Migration market is $181.29 billion. It is projected to reach $628.83 billion in the next five years, with a forecasted CAGR of 28.24%. 

Let us understand what Cloud Migration is.

Cloud Migration Strategy

A cloud migration strategy is a method that a business selects to move its data and business applications from an on-premises architecture to the cloud. It plays a major role in the cloud transformation journey, upon which the entire migration process depends.

The fundamental step in migration is developing a robust strategy. The chief objective is to seamlessly migrate workloads from the on-premises infrastructure to the cloud without influencing regular business operations. Since every organization’s journey to the cloud is different, there is no one-size-fits-all migration approach. Creating a roadmap for migration will help fix all the issues arising. This is where cloud migration strategies become essential in this context.  

Exploring the Key Benefits of Cloud Migration Strategy 

Failure to establish a proper migration strategy can result in downtime, a shortage of internal resources, uncertain costs, and data security risks. However, following the right framework will help reduce costs and flexibility and enhance security for a successful migration. Below are a few benefits of the Cloud Migration Strategy. 

Scalability and Flexibility

Cloud Migration improves organizational scalability by enabling businesses to instantly increase or decrease IT resources as and when needed. One of the key advantages of cloud migration is storage optimization which enables organizations to meet their business requirements efficiently. Furthermore, it allows the organization to easily adapt to changes when necessary.

Enhanced Cost Savings and Efficiency

Scaling a business can often come at a high cost. It may even take months and years for proper planning and implementation. Migrating strategies can be carried out without any downtime if carefully planned and executed. A well-planned strategy helps to determine areas where cost reduction can be attained.  

Increased Agility

Cloud agility denotes developing, testing, and launching applications in a cloud-based environment. A cloud-first organization can swiftly adapt to changing business needs. Moreover, the size of the organization in a cloud environment is no longer an issue.

Better Reliability and Maintenance

Most of the chief cloud vendors operate a global network of modern infrastructure. Selecting a vendor that offers low network latency and robust business continuity can provide several benefits. Similarly, the maintenance of software is a resource-intensive obligation. However, migrating to the cloud increases better reliability and maintenance. 

The 6 R's of Cloud Migration Strategy

There are various types of cloud migrations, so each one requires a well-defined migration strategy. By using the 6 R’s of cloud migration, you can select clear migration routes. Discover the 6 R's of the Cloud Migration Strategy to plan and outline your application transformation roadmap.

Rehost

Rehosting is also known as ‘lift and shift’. It is a process in which an application is moved from an on-premise environment to a cloud computing platform or infrastructure. Today, many organizations are using this strategy to meet business goals and migrate large-scale legacy apps. Rehosting is a common strategy that has been widely used since apps are simpler to re-architect in the cloud. Usually, this strategy doesn’t require any significant reconfigurations or alterations.  

Advantages: 

• Requires no code changes
• Manages security
• Accelerates migration 

Re-platform

This strategy is similar to Rehosting. When an app is re-platformed, a few configuration options can be modified to make it more cloud-friendly without changing the architecture. In general, re-platforming is related to cloud migration and digital migration because it involves transferring infrastructure from an on-premise to the cloud. Developers frequently employ this method to modify how apps interact with databases, allowing them to operate on controlled infrastructures like Amazon RDS and Google CloudSQL.  

Advantages: 

• Minor code changes 
• Cost efficiency 
• Improved performance optimization 

Refactoring

Refactoring or Rearchitecting involves modifying the application to the cloud environment. Although the cloud migration approach is costly and time-consuming, it often results in long-term cost savings. To refactor the affected application, a new application architecture is used. The components of the application are typically broken down into smaller units, or microservices, and packed in containers for deployment.  

Advantages:  

• Enhances code readability 
• Reduces Complexity 
• Makes code easier to understand 

Repurchase

Repurchase is also known as ‘Drop and Shop’. It is one of the fastest and simplest methods in the cloud migration strategy. This process involves switching to a different product, which may require terminating existing licenses on a new platform.  

Advantages: 

• Minimizes effort
• Replaces older systems with SaaS (Software as a Service) and modern apps
• Speeds up the migration process

Retire

The retirement strategy involves the identification of unused applications that are no longer useful. Here, the unused services can be disabled so that businesses can focus on offerings that are in high demand and profitable. It enables us to assess the costs, and dependencies that they bring to the company.  

Advantages:  

• Decreases costs
• Enhances the customer experience
• Frees up space on the on-premises servers

Revisiting

Revisiting is also known as ‘Retaining’ which is used for applications that are not ready for migration. In some cases, applications may be recently updated and need to be retained. In other cases, due to regulatory constraints or compliance, the applications may be retained. Additionally, to ensure business continuity retaining is often employed in a hybrid cloud.  

 Advantages:  

• Reduces workload 
• Lowers cost  
• Improves performance 

Key Factors Influencing Cloud Migration Strategy 

Business Objective - The key roles of business such as high scalability, cost optimization, and flexibility significantly impact the cloud migration strategy. Additionally, organizations need to consider time frame, cost, and cloud architecture.  

Cost Reduction - Organizations looking to migrate to the cloud must weigh the cost implications. The resources should be moved by considering the storage cost and bandwidth. If the cost is more than estimated, it might be prudent to decide on which component needs refactoring or retaining. Once done the cost can be saved in the longer run.  

Security and Compliance - Normally, the migration process faces security issues due to large volumes of data transfer. Security measures must be taken to avoid the issue. Migration strategies like AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and Access Management (IAM) are employed to offer secure access and encryption, effectively addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

Workload Requirement - The requirement and maturity of the applications being migrated to the cloud may also affect the migration. Considering the high performance of the cloud, high availability, and low latency can be migrated with minimal downtime. After the identification of each stage, the migration strategy should align with duration, set of goals, and milestones.  

Keeping Up with the Future - Technology is evolving at a faster pace. The refactoring strategy for migration might be the best option for a company that depends on keeping up with the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Additionally, building on-premise data can be expensive. An organization may do its best to use the refactoring strategy to migrate to the cloud if keeping up with the times is the top priority.  

Conclusion

A successful migration requires a well-defined strategy that considers factors like cloud model selection, data migration, and environment assessment. Careful planning, testing, and resource allocation are required for a cloud migration strategy. The above-listed 6 R's of cloud migration can be used to decide which solution fits the best. Businesses can undergo these strategies to migrate to the cloud to gain a better user experience.  

The technology landscape will therefore continue to change and provide us with better migration options based on business requirements, preferences, and available resources.