Moving to the cloud can be a daunting task for many companies, especially for the IT department. Concerns about the impact on existing business operations, data security, compliance, and more are critical factors that often arise.
At Automatic Infotech, we understand the challenges of cloud migration and offer expert consulting to ensure that your cloud migration strategy is based on professional inputs and industry best practices.
A successful enterprise cloud migration strategy will include prioritizing workloads for migration, determining the correct migration plan for each individual workload, developing a pilot, testing, and adjusting the strategy based on the results of the pilot. A cloud migration strategy document should be created to guide teams through the process and facilitate roll-back if necessary.
Perhaps the simplest form of migration. As the name implies, this involves lifting your stack and shifting it from on-premises hosting to the cloud. You transport an exact copy of your current environment without making extensive changes for the quickest ROI. Companies with a conservative culture or no long-term strategy for harnessing advanced cloud capabilities are well suited for rehosting.
As a variation on the lift and shift, replatforming involves making a few further adjustments to optimize your landscape for the cloud. Again, the core architecture of applications stays the same. This, too, is a good strategy for conservative organizations that want to build trust in the cloud while achieving benefits like increased system performance.
This means moving your applications to a new, cloud-native product, most commonly a SaaS platform. The challenge is losing the familiarity of existing code and training your team on the new platform. Even so, repurchasing might be your most cost-effective option if moving from a highly customized legacy landscape.
Refactoring (or rearchitecting) means rebuilding your applications from scratch. This is usually driven by a business need to leverage cloud capabilities that are not available in your existing environment, such as cloud auto-scaling or serverless computing. Refactoring is generally the most expensive option, but also the most compatible with future versions.
Once you have assessed your application portfolio for cloud readiness, you might find some applications are no longer useful. In this case, simply turn them off. The resulting savings might even boost your business case for applications that are ready for migration.
For some organizations, cloud adoption does not yet make sense. Are you unable to take data off premises for compliance reasons? Perhaps you are not ready to prioritize an app that was recently upgraded? In this case, plan to revisit cloud computing at a later date. You should only migrate what makes sense for your business.
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