Cloud Migration – Infra and Apps

Cloud Migration – Infra and Apps

Cloud migration is the process of moving a company’s digital assets, services, databases, IT resources, and applications either partially, or wholly, into the cloud. Cloud migration is also about moving from one cloud to another.

Companies wishing to move on from outdated and increasingly inefficient legacy infrastructures, such as aging servers or potentially unreliable firewall appliances, or to abandon hardware or software solutions that are no longer operating at optimum capacity, are now turning to the cloud to experience the benefits of cloud computing.

Types of Cloud Migration Strategies:

• Rehosting (Lift and Shift): What are the advantages of a lift and shift (also called “rehosting) approach? It’s quick and requires minimal refactoring. But (and this is a big but) the downsides of lift-and-shift include the fact that one may miss out on benefits you’d see if going cloud native because you’re performing the bare minimum changes needed. This means you could end up paying for the speed and the ease of your migration in the long run — at least when compared to a more thorough approach. Lift-and-shift can be used for simple, low-impact workloads, particularly by organizations that are still far from cloud maturity.
• Re-platforming (Move and Improve): The move-and-improve (or re-platforming) approach to migration includes making some modern updates to your application — like, say, introducing scaling or automation — without throwing the whole thing out. This happy-medium approach can seem like the superior option at a glance, but it can result in migrations where you keep all your technical debt and get none of the cloud-native benefits.
• Refactoring (Rip and Replace): This approach (also called refactoring or re-architecting) means rebuilding your workload from scratch to be “cloud-native.” It takes an investment in time and skills development (particularly reskilling and upskilling your existing talent), but it pays out with the maximum benefits available in the cloud. While every organization and workload is unique, if the reason for moving to the cloud is to take advantage of its awesome benefits and capabilities, embracing cloud-native design principles should be your approach. This means taking the time to plan and do things right: ensuring your people have the necessary skills to make the move and refactoring your code.
• Remediate: This refers to a change in the solution design of the application. This could be a simple change at the database layer of SQL servers with a cloud database service like Amazon RDS, Azure Database, Google Cloud SQL or similar. It could also be a wholesale solution redesign of the application. This technique helps to improve functionality, performance, and security and also helps to reduce vulnerabilities.
• Repurchase: This is focused on replacing an on-premise or server-deployed version of the software with one provided by a vendor as SaaS. This model provides operational and cost benefits through the reduction in operational overhead – effectively having zero infrastructure to run and maintain. However, this needs to be offset against data security and availability risks as the application and data is hosted and managed by the vendor. Consideration also needs to be given to the licensing costs of the SaaS platform, which can be higher, and feature parity against the previous version the users are familiar with.
• Retain: This option retains the application as is. Often, this could be due to it having a limited lifespan, i.e. a few months, where it makes no sense to invest money in migration. It can also refer to ‘re-visit’ where one comes back to the application at a later date. For example, due to latency requirements, compliance reasons or simply because the benefits of a migration won’t outweigh the cost and effort to be invested.
• Retire: The Retire strategy means that an application is explicitly phased out. This makes sense when the business capabilities this application provides are not needed anymore or are offered in a redundant way (this is then sometimes called Reconcile to express the consolidating effect when leveraging the existing application portfolio for replacements) . In practice , between 10 – 20 per cent of an enterprise IT portfolio gets retired.

Benefits of Migration to the Cloud:

• Elasticity and scalability: Cloud allows for improved scalability, giving organizations the ability to almost instantaneously add or take away resources on an as-needed basis or to match demand. Elasticity goes hand in hand with scalability and refers to the ability to quickly expand or decrease computer processing, memory, and storage resources (data storage optimization) to meet changing demands without concerning yourself with cloud capacity planning. Elasticity enables scalability.The process of scaling can be done automatically (called autoscaling), based on, for example, the time of day or the amount of processor resources being used.

• Cost savings and effectiveness: Cloud gives you the ability to only pay for the resources you use. (Think: taking an Uber instead of buying a car.) This gives one access to resources that would cost way too much time and money to keep up yourself, which ties back into scalability. But where cloud scalability really leaves on-prem scalability in the dust is around decreasing resources. Traditional IT infrastructure can require having enough resources to handle peak demand. (For example, a retailer having to pay for the data center resources to be ready for a rush of Black Friday shoppers, even though they’re not half as busy the other 364 days of the year.) Cloud infrastructure can scale up and down with the peaks and valleys of a year, month, day, or hour.
• Performance, Reliability, and Resiliency: The big cloud service providers run a worldwide, world-class network of facilities packed with cutting-edge tech. This ensures everything from keeping network latency low to delivering near unparalleled data backup and disaster recovery.
• Security and Compliance: Most cloud providers are big companies with big companies relying on them. That’s why they go out of the way to consider security and compliance, which includes staying on top of updates and trends that will ensure that sensitive data is safe in the cloud.

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