As of now, cloud services are used by 94% of companies. This is a massive percentage of adoption. The main reason behind this shift is the Covid-19 pandemic, which caused a reliance on remote work. Cloud adoption is common because of its substantial unlimited benefits. From scalability, security, and more organized and accessible data to saving money, organizations have been rapidly switching their infrastructure to the cloud.
As per another report, in 2020, 61% of businesses migrated their workloads to the cloud. This shift is happening in every industry, such as retail, media, education, telecommunication, banking & financial services. This rapid technological shift is only possible just because of cloud migration experts.
In this blog post, we’re going to highlight some of the quick yet important steps to migration to the cloud. You will also walk through some of the main advantages of moving apps to the cloud and some common cloud migration risks.
Advantages of Moving Apps to the cloud
Cloud solutions are undeniably gaining popularity and momentum. Organizations can take several benefits from cloud migration services. Check them out:
- Scalability: With cloud computing solutions, organizations will only pay for what they need. There may be times when your business makes a sudden breakthrough or simply needs to upscale its storage to get ahead of future demand. There is a significant benefit of moving apps to the cloud that you can scale with agility without investing too much in hardware.
- Security & data protection: It comes with higher security. Cloud comes with a data encryption process. It means that it does not allow unauthorized users to access the data. According to the survey report, over 500 IT leaders and executives said that the security and data protection is the top driver.
- Cloud computing helps in ensuring your data is completely confidential and secured by providing a number of advantages, such as easy database backups, infrastructure monitoring, and detailed logging.
- By investing in multi cloud management, organizations can get availability and reliability. It also enables you to distribute your application instances across multiple zones. In case, if there is one instance that fails, then there will be another instance that can handle such requests.
7 Steps of Migration into the Cloud
Step #1: Set up the migration architect role
Before moving ahead to cloud migration, you need to set up the migration architect role. The term “migration architect” is a system architect-level position. It is generally responsible for planning and completing the entire features of the cloud migration. When it comes to big-size projects, there are several decisions and technical plans that should be made. Nevertheless, a migration architect is responsible for all the aspects of the migration is crucial for a successful project.
The core responsibilities of a migration architect include:
- Defining the necessary refactoring to make the migration successful
- Defining cloud-solution requirements
- Designing strategies for data migration
- Determining migration priorities
- Production switchover mechanisms
Step #2: Assessment of existing infrastructure
The second step is to map your applications, databases, and other assets. This way, it’s easier to understand their interdependencies. With a deep understanding, it will be seamless to understand what is inside your infrastructure and help you outline a migration plan. The migration process includes disk usage, backup retention, and evaluating data storage. The assessment is about the cost of migration and ROI. These can be achieved in the productive version.
Step #3: Isolating
The next step is to isolate all systematic and environmental dependencies of the enterprise app components (APIs, databases, security policies, network configurations, deployment configurations, and application binaries) within the confined data center.
Furthermore, make sure that your infrastructure is completely ready for the move. So, following are the questions that you should ask yourself:
- Are applications completely isolated and packaged? Do apps support scaling?
- Can application copies work simultaneously?
- Does your service comply with the 12-factor app principle?
Step #4: Re Architect
There may be times when some substantial part of the app needs to be redesigned, rearchitected, and re-implemented on the cloud. Due to the migration process, there are chances of losing some functionalities.
Step #5: Deployment
The deployment can be done by moving the planned components and testing them on a small group of users. All you need to keep yourself ready for unfavorable conditions. If everything goes seamless, you can embark on planning and switching more users to the migrated services.
Step #6: Monitoring
You need to closely monitor the process of data migration so that you can easily identify and resolve if there is an emergence of any problem. You should follow all the key factors to assess the entire health of deployment. Don’t forget to close attention to the costs. You can also verify that the initial cost optimization estimations are correct, not actual traffic.
Step #7: Follow-up & Maintenance cost
Once the deployment is complete and stable, you are ready to switch to the migrated environment. When testing is done, you may find some errors. However, it is normal due to the fact that such errors were made during the migration process. Therefore, you can iterate on your new foundation and work towards an efficient model. What’s more? If you still notice errors or corrupt data, you can restore files from your backup.
Some Cloud Migration Risks
Here’re some general cloud migration risks which you may face during your migration:
- Inadequacy of visibility & control
- Data breach
- Denial of Service (DoS) attacks
- Vendor lock-in
- Data loss
- Incomplete deletion of data
From a security perspective, issues of trust and privacy generally emerge as one of the top cloud migration risks.
Wrapping Up
To get the most out of cloud migration, organizations need to switch immediately. There is no room for doubt in that moving apps into the cloud is a complex process. But, it’s recommended to take advice from a professional team of cloud experts. The advantage of hiring professionals is that they can understand your business’s objectives and mitigate the risks.
If you want to share your thoughts with us on cloud migration or multi-cloud management, you can comment below. We’d like to hear from you.
Author Bio: Hardik Shah is a Tech Consultant at Simform, a firm that provides custom software development services. He leads large-scale mobility programs that cover platforms, solutions, governance, standardization, and best practices.