Cloud Migration as the companies’ top priorities for 2022

Dmitry Kushnir

3 years ago

Table of Contents

A cloud-powered future is starting to shape more and more enterprises migrate toward remote infrastructure. Managing cloud adoption seems to be one of the companies’ top priorities for 2021. It’s expected to maintain its status as a priority in the next few years too.

But why is cloud computing so popular? Well, it enables both users and enterprises to run software without installing it, stability and security. Cloud computing removes the problem of buying and maintaining hardware.

The cloud also allows us to access content from basically anywhere which became especially in demand with the onset of the pandemic. Generally, it is more affordable, which makes it suitable for businesses of any size. When it comes to technical expertise, certain services give maximum control to the end-users.

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Experts say 60% of workloads are running on a hosted cloud service in 2019. For reference, the cloud-hosted 45% of workloads in 2018.

The companies that have successfully moved to the cloud name the next benefits as increased efficiency, ease of access, simpler administration and management, and lower costs in general, according to Statista. But before savoring the benefits of cloud migration, businesses will have to make it effectively – a process is often followed by different challenges like lack of planning to outdated technology, etc.

Public cloud spends growing 3 times faster than its private counterpart. The first marks a 24% growth, while the latter – just 8%. (Source: RightScale)

Challenges of Cloud Migration

When migrating, it should be borne in mind that some applications you use may require optimization of particular parts or changes in the base code to integrate with the cloud to go smoother. You may also need to embed an application already in the cloud to replace the original application.

Migration to the cloud becomes necessary when an organization’s application needs to scale beyond an on-premises data center’s capabilities. Another reason to migrate is if your organization has legacy apps no longer supported by app vendors.

If your organization’s app is out of date, moving to the cloud can be difficult. We similarly wrote about this in the article 9 Reasons that will convince you to redevelop your Desktop app to a cloud-based application

People and processes

The biggest challenge during cloud adoption isn’t technology – it’s the people and processes that must change and adapt. It takes time and restricting the effectiveness of cloud adoption.

Not Getting Caught Up In The Hype

It comes from childhood “Don’t put more food on your plate than you can eat.” With cloud migrations, it’s critical not to get caught up in the hype. If you do, you’ll choose to put more in the cloud than your teams can manage effectively, and/or you’ll match the wrong workloads to the wrong provider. Do proper planning to match the workloads and migrate in priority order.

Connecting Legacy Systems With Cloud Applications.

Most current systems (the backbone of an organization’s operations) are not cloud-ready. The biggest challenge is to redevelop or connect legacy software with new cloud-based business applications. More information about it you will find here.

Best Practices for Cloud Migration

This article covers the best ways that can help companies make their shifting to the cloud more successful.

Define a Migration Strategy. Shifting to the cloud is one of the most critical steps for the migration of infrastructure and applications to the cloud. Clearly, share why the strategy is important to the organization. There are the 5 “R’s” by Gartner, which organizations can use to map out a migration strategy.
Outline and share a clear cloud governance model. Given that fulfillment and security are top issues for organizations moving to the cloud, it is vital to create a cloud governance framework with clear, policy-based rules that help companies get ready for secure cloud adoption. Cloud governance takes into account the related risks of trusting data and apps to third-party services. It determines ways of doing things – tools, procedures, skills, and competencies – so that the company migrating to the cloud can be with minimal risk and maximum value.
Train staff early in the process. The more qualified your teams are in the cloud service, the smoother the transition will be. The cloud introduces the different designs of public cloud systems. There should be a dedicated series of training sessions designed to get employees across different cloud concepts.

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66% of enterprises already have a central cloud team or cloud center of excellence. (Source: RightScale) Another 21% plan on having one shortly. The main responsibilities of these central IT departments shape up to be optimizing cloud costs (for 68% of enterprises), figuring out which applications should run on which cloud (for 62%), and finally – setting policies for cloud use (for 59%)
Network Management. A cloud migration best practice is to develop the whole cloud architecture before beginning the migration and map the resources to their respective areas. The cloud gives the ability to create a virtual private cloud or network and enables you to create subnets with the required IP blocks, define IP addresses for the resources, and set the routing between them. When you need to maintain functionality, the legacy application components should have the same IP address as the components depend on the IP address for the connectivity.
Licensing and Migration Cost. License management is essential for cloud migration and is concerned with various areas of the environment, i.e., operating system licenses, application server licenses, and third-party tool licenses. A company should check there any possibility of moving or convert the licenses to cloud-based licenses or not. For operating system licenses, the cloud provider instance cost includes the license cost. Third-party tools and companies are still looking for the best license management approach on both the on-premise and cloud.
Identify repeated items and automate them. The automation of cloud migration is provided to build infrastructure as code and automatically replace the applications without any downtime. At the time of the migration of multiple applications, companies face repeatable patterns that can be automated. It will reduce migration time and ensure more sequence.
Monitoring and Governance. In the process of the cloud migration or post-migration stage, the conditions should be analyzed. The application, system, network, and audit logs should be collected and carefully studied with the data supplied by the monitoring dashboard to perform a correlation between the various components and visualize and identify the enhancement areas to generate better benefits.
Service provider support usage. Any cloud migration project needs a good support team that consists of experts in a particular service. They should be able to answer rapidly to technical questions or help you with any issues.

Cloud migration techniques and strategies

Several different methods can be used to transfer an application to the cloud. Sometimes it is possible to integrate an existing solution with cloud services, but often you have to create applications from scratch to replace an existing one.

Lift-and-shift

an approach in which the company’s existing digital solutions are not changed but merely re-hosted in the cloud rather than on a local server. Lift-and-shift can include copying application binaries, creating and configuring virtual machine (VM) images, creating security groups, configuring elastic IP addresses and domain name systems (DNS), and switching to a new database in the cloud. This can be combined with the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) infrastructure of the cloud provider.

Refactoring

It is reusing existing code and application frameworks, but the application runs on Platform as a Service (PaaS) rather than IaaS. The application architecture does not change, but it is partially optimized for the cloud. In other words, you need to extend the code base before deploying the solution to the cloud.

Replacing or purchasing a similar solution

this approach involves the rejection of old software (purchased or developed for oneself) and the transition to a new product. These new applications are a software as a service (SaaS) applications. Let’s say you decide to replace the outdated CRM with Salesforce or its alternative.

A staged (hybrid) migration

It is an approach that involves using several of the above methods. With this approach, the transfer to the cloud occurs in parts, which makes this process smoother. At the same time, each module is optimized separately – different parts can interact through interfaces designed for the cloud environment.

How to choose the Cloud Computing Service Provider

During elaborating on a cloud migration strategy, you should choose the Cloud Computing Service Provider. Cloud services offer a unique ability to improving business performance and increasing profits. Here we’ll look at a forecast of the leading cloud computing service providers, along with some additional recommendations to consider.

Predict the market share you expect AWS, Microsoft, and Google to hold in 2021.

Amazon Web Services is a cloud-based program for building business solutions using integrated web services. AWS offers an extensive range of IaaS and PaaS services. These include Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Elastic Beanstalk, Simple Storage Service (S3), and Relational Database Service (RDS).
AWS offers extensive admin controls available through its secure Web client. Users can access some features from here, including encryption key creation and auditing.
Aws gives you the ability to customize infrastructure requirements. These costs are far less than if you were set up in your own facilities.
Microsoft Azure users can use any service on the cloud or reconcile it with existing applications, data centers, or infrastructure. The Azure Migration Centre makes cloud migration faster and easier. The solution is also compatible with Linux.
Google Cloud Platform is Google’s cloud service provider. The platform allows users to create business solutions using Google-provided, modular web services. It gives a wide array of services, including IaaS and PaaS solutions.
With Google Cloud’s multi-layered secure infrastructure, users can be certified that anything you build, create, a highly expertized team of engineers will secure code or store.

All Cloud Computing Service Providers also offer a free 1-month trial period. Once your trial period has expired, you have to choose a paid plan or cancel your subscription.

We recommend Amazon Web Services as one of the reliable services for cloud migration. We use it from the start to this day and say that it has a user-friendly interface for auto-scaling, load log monitoring, notification controlling, etc. Also, we can help with cloud migration to any other service.

The cloud providers make computing resources and services, such as applications, databases, and storage available and accessible to customers through the public Internet. Moreover, the main reasons for moving to the public cloud are:

Reduced costs – Using IT resources such as cloud services and paying per use leads to dramatic cost reductions with none of the upfront capital expense required by on-premise equipment.
Business digitalization – the public cloud allows organizations to alter and optimize their business and organizational activities by leveraging a mix of digital technologies.
Focus on value – the public cloud removes several of the more time-consuming activities involved in managing your IT infrastructure and platforms, outsourcing them to a service provider, which allows your business to focus on creating value, innovating, and driving revenue.
Business agility – companies must react quickly to challenges and opportunities, and the public cloud provides the means to achieve this agility.

Do not draw digital transformation out into a lifetime special. Your competitors may establish their cloud migration strategy right now. Be ahead of other companies and start to use the benefits of Cloud Computing Service Providers.

FAQ

✨ What processes can be migrated to the cloud?

You have a variety of options that you can move from your workflow to the cloud. Exactly which operations will be migrated will depend on your business and cloud strategy. You can move everything to the cloud or a specific process. There is also the option of transferring work processes in parts (in stages). Many companies use the cloud to back up their data, both short term, and long term. Application work can also be moved to the cloud (e.g., CRM, marketing automation, etc.) Testing and development activities can also be outsourced.

✨ How to develop a cloud strategy?

Developing a cloud strategy starts with defining your technical and business goals. You need to define the purpose of your move to the cloud and how you will benefit from it. To ensure that the transition to the cloud is not stressful for your employees and the company as a whole, it is best to start with small processes and gradually move the company to use cloud services. Once you understand your cloud integration needs, it will be easier to know how to create a migration strategy and include public, private, or hybrid cloud solutions. Create a roadmap and timeline for the transition to the cloud.

✨ What is the difference between a hybrid cloud and multiple clouds?

In a multi-cloud, organizations use multiple public cloud providers. An example of this would be when an organization wants to create a disaster recovery plan using multiple public cloud providers to minimize the risk of using only one CSP. In a hybrid cloud, organizations use both public and private clouds. An example of this would be if an organization has systems that do not use or store any sensitive information, the public cloud can be used, or vice versa.