Cloud migration helps businesses transit their databases, software applications, and other IT resources to remote servers. This allows organizations to manage the software development and lifecycle process efficiently. The costs of maintaining on-premises data centers are high. Most businesses reckon that the compared cost of individual centers are far too high than the cost of services at dominant public cloud hosts like AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure.
Enterprises adopt cloud migration for improved scalability, faster deployment, and better availability of software services. Making the migration process secure, seamless, and transparent is equally essential. This article aims at shedding light on the crucial aspects of cloud migration, including challenges and strategies to migrate to the cloud.
Cloud Migration – Challenges
Despite your enterprises’ unique configurations, cloud migrations have a few common challenges.
1. Infrastructure incompatibility between clouds — Various approaches that usually lead to lift and shift strategy can make shifting to the cloud challenging, if not impossible. Different working environments with unique operating systems make the primary reason why migrating on-premise applications is complex. Therefore, experienced experts such as AWS migration service partners can efficiently provide hybrid cloud solutions to integrate into the public cloud. They may also similar infrastructure as your data center to eliminate such compatibility issues. AWS Cloud Migration Services can help you minimize the downtime for apps that depend on the database. Usually, users do not have to make any changes to their source centers or install any drivers. They can also help you continually monitor databases to avoid interruptions.
2. Challenges with existing security policies — Most of the time, there is a lack of support from public host providers, making Data security, control over IT Services, and compliance with regulatory mandates tricky. Apart from managing these and top security concerns, you may also require to reach a deeper level of security. You must meet a broad range of compliance standards to ensure required benchmarks and regulations.
3. Application with dependencies — It is natural to have applications and systems that depend on the infrastructure and data sources in a data-driven organization. Many organizations migrating such apps experience latency in their performance or critical functioning due to interdependence between operations, infrastructure, and applications. Before you even start implementing migration, it is crucial to visualize data flows across your infrastructure to identify interdependent apps and prepare action plans to migrate them seamlessly.
4. Cost — Lift and shift approach to migration may seem a cost-effective affair. However, in turn, it could turn out to be far more expensive, especially if you want to have a better fit. Many applications may require rounds of refactoring and rewriting, embarking you on an inevitable journey of extra expenses. Fitting to public cloud host configurations is not usually as easy it may seem. Without the proper approximation, your mission-critical applications may end up facing blows in terms of performance.
5. Improper strategic planning — Many organizations do not use documented cloud strategy adequately, jeopardizing successful migration. Cloud migration must be taken as a step-by-step process that requires you to plan and understand app data flows. It also must estimate the ongoing costs of the entire process and network egress.
6. Internal Staff Management — Digital transformation has spurred a skill shortage in cloud experience staff. The impact of potential skill shortage would hinder you from accessing the cloud environment and managing any outages. An expert onboard is a team familiar with such issues and can efficiently fill skill gaps during the migration process.
Cloud migration strategies for enterprise companies?
Database management and modernization of legacy applications is a driving concern for many businesses opting for cloud migration. However, the Legacy code can swiftly be containerized or shifted from private cloud hardware and mainframes to a public cloud environment. Similarly, Enterprise databases can also be transferred from various on-premises hardware to a remote public cloud facility for hosting.
When accomplished appropriately, cloud migration leads to better efficiency in new software code development for mobile and web applications. Additionally, it also saves you cost on hardware and staff.
The first concern that arises here is how will your company address legacy apps in the cloud facility? Cloud-native capabilities can be superior to legacy capabilities in multiple ways. If so, enterprises must make strategic choices on migrating their data and apps. Below are five practical strategies to migrate efficiently.
- Rehost — It is the most used approach to cloud migration. It requires you to simply move your codebase to a cloud facility while simultaneously executing configuration changes. However, if your legacy apps are incompatible, you can choose one of the following routes.
- Re-platforming or Revising— If enterprise apps are incompatible with the cloud environment, you require a partial rewrite of the codebase to optimize for the cloud environment. After such re-platforming, the app can be rehosted on the cloud vendor’s environment.
- Refactor — Sometimes, your legacy software can simply be too outdated to run on current cloud technology, requiring a complete rewrite. While it may seem like a setback but more often than not, refactoring provides you an opportunity to update apps for good. Using efficient cloud-native capabilities is advantageous and will likely make your app superior to the old version.
- Replacing or Repurchasing — Refactoring is time-consuming and often costly. In such cases, a cloud-native SaaS app could be a better approach to replace your legacy app conveniently. It works optimum for sales or accounting applications and can help you allocate your budget better. However, enterprises may be pressed to refactor their proprietary apps for the cloud for specialized software.
- Retiring and Revisiting — Migrating to the cloud can turn out to be a spring cleaning opportunity for your system. It helps you reprioritize high-priority apps and allows you to segregate or retire any out-of-date software. As a result, you will save on expensive legacy maintenance.
Conclusion
Cloud migration is now a significant aspect of enterprise software modernization. It makes it more efficient and scalable and helps with better hardware allocations to support web business. Thus, assisting boosts to business’ ability to support high web traffic, particularly is need of the hour. It also helps with smooth online operations on domain properties.
It is extremely essential to strike a balance between operations and migration and check that these two do not overstep each other. No matter where you are on the migration journey, you always have tools that can help ease the migration process. You can use tools to extend your on-premise cloud and leverage them with your preferred public cloud partner.
