Cloud migration is a great way to attract growth and stability in the business. Nowadays, organizations take the help of cloud services to improve the functionality of their IT sector to fight competition. The transitions from the local servers to the cloud include numerous steps and processes that companies must follow to attain the best profit. It would help if you were prepared thoroughly before moving toward production. The actions that have been observed in a cloud migration strategy are generally identical, and you just need to focus on the core process that depends on the size of the company, its infrastructure, and the reasons behind the cloud migration.
In this article, we will descend into the significant steps in the cloud migration process to understand its operations better.
- Identify and Define your migration objectives.
You need to have a proper and accurate understanding of the applications when migration is required in the organization. It would help if you initiated by auditing the digital assets you possess to identify the scope of:
- Creating a list of software which are in use.
- Finding the applications which need to provide more value.
- Figuring out the applications which will offer more weight when they are moved.
You need to pay proper focus to the dependencies as they are an essential point in the overall process. Organizations must consider the dependencies between the applications in the initial phase of the cloud migration strategy to acquire the best from it. There are various firms that use several applications on different servers and unique networking tools.
- Establish success criteria.
In order to have a successful implementation of the cloud migration strategy, businesses should establish success criteria to set aims. We know that firms use the key performance indicators to measure their success and performance to learn about the things which are working and things that are not. Cloud migration is also similar to this. You must establish KPIs that align with the business goals you have thought of. It helps you understand the right things that are working fine and aren’t.
There are some common KPIs that help you to measure the performance of the before and after migration activities:
- Availability.
- Maintenance costs
- Scalability
- Operational load.
- Access speed.
- Selecting a cloud provider.
You must be wise when choosing a cloud model such as public, private or hybrid. When you have selected it, you can go starting with the examination of the different cloud providers available in the market. Choose the suitable one that fits your business organization and needs.
You will find numerous reports over the internet that will help you decide on the right provider for yourself.
- Select automation tools.
After selecting the cloud provider, you can choose the correct company automation tools. There are varied tools available in the market which are designed to make migration happen. These tools will help you reduce the stress built on you by performing tedious tasks. With their support, you can migrate better and faster with fewer expenses and risks.
Therefore, you need to be extra careful while choosing tools for you as automation becomes a must to have, especially when there are huge components that need to be migrated. It also helps in running performance tests to make sure that everything works as planned.
Various Cloud providers possess their own automation tools, such as:
- AWS Server Migration Service.
- Azure Migrate.
- Migrate for Compute Engine.
- Choose the migration strategy.
The next step in the process is picking the cloud migration strategy. There are six R’s strategies that are standard cloud migration services:
- Rehost.
- Replatform.
- Refactor.
- Repurchase.
- Retire.
- Retain.
- Always Prepare a backup approach.
Shifting to the cloud needs a backup plan. When data is stored on-premises, any problem thus encountered needs the help of the IT team to load the files from the backup drives and replenish them into an application. When a cloud is considered, there are no such options.
You can take a guide from some of the steps thus mentioned:
- Implement cloud-native backup practices and tools.
- Build a data-access policy.
- Conduct appropriate staff training to reduce accidental losses.
- Lead an anti-deletion campaign for your data.
- Always put your backups in automated mode.
- Set up a test environment to test the waters.
- Go for automated migration tools where it’s workable and suitable after completing backups.
- Migrate
The above-mentioned steps were the main task of all the things that you need to perform. Now that you have done all the preparations and taken into consideration all the critical decisions for your business, you can now proceed with the initialization of the migration procedure. It is the last step; at this stage, you need to start moving all the data and users to the cloud infrastructure.