Introduction
Running your business in the cloud has many benefits, such as becoming more agile, the ability to go global quickly and significant cost savings. With so much to offer, it is apparent why leading organizations are looking to leverage the benefits of cloud computing. Not only are firms migrating applications and datacenters to the cloud, they are taking advantage of leading capabilities offered by cloud providers. Business and IT users benefit in myriad ways, such as fast virtual desktops, advanced AI and machine learning analytics, automated data backup and rapid disaster recovery.
However, some organizations are hesitant to begin a cloud adoption journey due to perceived challenges and roadblocks. These first steps are made easier if a cloud migration follows well established strategies. Cloud migration and modernization should be viewed as a continuous process that requires change management spanning people, process and technology. Taking a comprehensive approach will not only help you successfully navigate the journey, but ensure that you realize the intended benefits of being more agile, having the ability to scale, and operational efficiency.
However, some organizations are hesitant to begin a cloud adoption journey due to perceived challenges and roadblocks. These first steps are made easier if a cloud migration follows well established strategies. Cloud migration and modernization should be viewed as a continuous process that requires change management spanning people, process and technology. Taking a comprehensive approach will not only help you successfully navigate the journey, but ensure that you realize the intended benefits of being more agile, having the ability to scale, and operational efficiency.
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Plan
Implement
Operate
Plan
Plan
This phase should start with defining the business benefits and a migration strategy. Defining and documenting business drivers for cloud migration and modernization will clarify the reasons for migrating. The next step is to discover and assess applications, databases and infrastructure. All major cloud platforms provide automated assessment tools that help to get insights on dependencies, create application inventory and assess on-premises environment to get right-sizing guidance, workload level cost estimates and performance metrics.Primary considerations of these assessments include:
- Hardware and performance
- Number of users and licensing issues
- Compliance
- Dependencies between applications
- Easy to migrate
- Difficult to migrate
- Can’t migrate
Implement
Implement
Automated migration tools provided by cloud platforms should be used as much as possible to carry out the migration. An iterative process of migrating one workload at a time or a small collection of workloads per release should be looked at. The data should be moved first. This includes moving data to object storage, file systems and databases. The next step is to migrate the applications. This can be a simple “lift and shift” or a re-platforming to the target cloud platform.Once applications are migrated, they should be modernized iteratively. Modernisation involves refactoring, re-architecting or rebuilding your apps and data. Use modernisation to achieve benefits like boosting app innovation, increasing agility and accelerating developer velocity.
Operate
Operate
The last phase is to govern and manage the migrated and modernized applications and optimize them continuously in the process. This would include getting visibility into and more control over security in order to quickly detect and respond to threats with intelligent threat detection techniques. Applications should be made redundant across cloud regions and availability zones and a disaster recovery plan should be in place. Also, cloud spending should be adjusted and monitored, thereby driving operational efficiencies.Migrating existing applications to cloud might feel overwhelming with concerns around cost and security. However, if done right, applications on the cloud can be more secure than traditional on-premises deployments. By moving to the cloud, operating costs can be considerably reduced by leveraging a pay-per-use cost model. Also, the use of a proper tools, techniques and frameworks ensure a smooth migration to the cloud and subsequent modernization.