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Embracing cloud may be an inevitable part of growth but moving data from traditional infrastructure to a cloud platform can be intimidating. Cloud migration is complex and the process has to be customized to the needs of the individual organization. You will need a cloud migration strategy that ensures the least disruption to services and addresses both your short-term and long-term organizational goals.
Primary questions that need to be answered before a cloud migration are what, where, and how to migrate.
A detailed exploration of your application and infrastructure estate along with business drivers for migration is imperative to effectively respond to these queries. Considerations over data security, regulatory compliance, conformance with SLAs, disaster recovery, and skills to build and operate the cloud environment can also influence your decisions.
Application DiscoveryServers, Software, Network devices, Storage
Dependency MappingSoftware dependencies, Server-to-storage relationships
Risk AssessmentSoftware license models for migrated applications, Security and compliance
PrioritizationSequencing and scheduling apps
We usually suggest a cloud fit analysis to help clients identify applications for migration. Through this estate-level exercise, we aim to categorize applications according to their complexity and suitability for migration (application discovery and grouping). The least complex and the most suitable applications are identified as first movers, while complex applications can be saved for later migration phases.
Mission-critical applications and those exposed to external users can be migrated later. If an application requires a rewrite for the cloud environment or if you plan to rebuild the app using microservices architecture, it should be migrated later considering the effort involved.
A hybrid cloud setup is when you operate with a mix of both public and private cloud environments. You may choose to move only certain applications to the public cloud. Legacy applications may be hosted in a private environment either on-premises or at a colocation data center. Alternatively, an application hosted in a private environment can burst through to the public cloud (cloud bursting) and tap into additional resources when there is a spike in demand.
Most organizations tend to leverage multiple cloud platforms considering the numerous value propositions and tradeoffs. In the multi-cloud approach, your applications can be deployed across one or more public cloud providers and/or a private cloud. With a mix of environments utilizing different providers, vendor lock-in risk is mitigated and you will have the flexibility to switch providers depending on specific needs and workloads.
The third piece of the puzzle is the how of the migration process. Most businesses looking to move out of their data centers or from one platform to another broadly do so in one of the following ways.
It is the easiest and least expensive way to migrate to a cloud platform from an on-premises setup. As the name suggests, this mode of migration involves moving your application as-is without any code modifications (shallow cloud integration). It provides the original application experience on the cloud and can use the same security mechanisms that were used on-premises. Consequently, rehosting can be effected fast or within a limited time. However, you may have to come back later to optimize the cloud solution for cost as well as performance.
As the demand for their flagship recruitment solution soared, it became necessary for our client to migrate their application infrastructure to a robust platform that offered a high level of scalability and security. They had to move urgently and without disrupting customers.
This mode of approach to cloud migration seeks to take advantage of cloud-native features such as elasticity and availability. You may need to rebuild the application or recode some portion of it to take full advantage of cloud frameworks and functionalities. As a result, the process is time- consuming as well as resource intensive but provides a mature solution. This cloud migration strategy offers a fallback option where you can implement canary deployments before transitioning in full and roll back to the old setup if any problem arises. Read More
Our client wanted an IoT processing Lambda layer in the cloud. The solution had to be highly available and capable of supporting multiple deployments per day. In parallel to the solution development, the client wanted us to create the architecture for their environment in the cloud.
An increasingly popular and commonly used cloud migration approach is the containerization strategy. This involves creating a container for your application that bundles together necessary components (application, libraries, configuration files) and migrating the container to the cloud. You can make use of a container orchestration mechanism to organize your containers. This approach affords portability as the container is abstracted away from the underlying OS and the infrastructure. Read More
Once the alpha phase was completed, our client required the solution to be moved out to either their cloud or a custom data center. So we created a DevOps platform for the solution. We decided to build the solution based on Microservices architecture with Docker containers for each service. To host and manage these docker containers, we opted to use Kubernetes and to ensure the containers remained stateless, we followed the “twelve-factor” methodology.
The third piece of the puzzle is the how of the migration process. Most businesses looking to move out of their data centers or from one platform to another broadly do so in one of the following ways.
It is the easiest and least expensive way to migrate to a cloud platform from an on-premises setup. As the name suggests, this mode of migration involves moving your application as-is without any code modifications (shallow cloud integration). It provides the original application experience on the cloud and can use the same security mechanisms that were used on-premises. Consequently, rehosting can be effected fast or within a limited time. However, you may have to come back later to optimize the cloud solution for cost as well as performance.
As the demand for their flagship recruitment solution soared, it became necessary for our client to migrate their application infrastructure to a robust platform that offered a high level of scalability and security. They had to move urgently and without disrupting customers.
This mode of approach to cloud migration seeks to take advantage of cloud-native features such as elasticity and availability. You may need to rebuild the application or recode some portion of it to take full advantage of cloud frameworks and functionalities. As a result, the process is time- consuming as well as resource intensive but provides a mature solution. This cloud migration strategy offers a fallback option where you can implement canary deployments before transitioning in full and roll back to the old setup if any problem arises. Read More
Our client wanted an IoT processing Lambda layer in the cloud. The solution had to be highly available and capable of supporting multiple deployments per day. In parallel to the solution development, the client wanted us to create the architecture for their environment in the cloud.
An increasingly popular and commonly used cloud migration approach is the containerization strategy. This involves creating a container for your application that bundles together necessary components (application, libraries, configuration files) and migrating the container to the cloud. You can make use of a container orchestration mechanism to organize your containers. This approach affords portability as the container is abstracted away from the underlying OS and the infrastructure.
Once the alpha phase was completed, our client required the solution to be moved out to either their cloud or a custom data center. So we created a DevOps platform for the solution. We decided to build the solution based on Microservices architecture with Docker containers for each service. To host and manage these docker containers, we opted to use Kubernetes and to ensure the containers remained stateless, we followed the “twelve-factor” methodology.
Faster and easier Needs reoptimization later Least risky as changes are minimal Easy to move Does not benefit from cloud-native features Least expensive but long-term cloud costs might increase due to lack of optimization
Complex and time-intensive Mature solution built to leverage cloud frameworks and functionalities Higher risk due to multiple changes Vendor lock-in Takes full advantage of cloud-native functionalities Minimizes long-term cloud costs though short-term costs are higher
Does not take as long as the cloud-native approach Finds a middle ground with code alone migrated to containers and the rest built as cloud-native solutions Risk involved can be limited with smart use of container features Cloud-agnostic Benefits from base cloud features such as scalability Increased short-term costs and lower long-term cloud costs
Faster and easier Needs reoptimization later Least risky as changes are minimal Easy to move Does not benefit from cloud-native features Least expensive but long-term cloud costs might increase due to lack of optimization
Complex and time-intensive Mature solution built to leverage cloud frameworks and functionalities Higher risk due to multiple changes Vendor lock-in Takes full advantage of cloud-native functionalities Minimizes long-term cloud costs though short-term costs are higher
Does not take as long as the cloud-native approach Finds a middle ground with code alone migrated to containers and the rest built as cloud-native solutions Risk involved can be limited with smart use of container features Cloud-agnostic Benefits from base cloud features such as scalability Increased short-term costs and lower long-term cloud costs
In addition to the above, there are two other cloud migration strategies that may be appropriate in certain scenarios.
Sometimes enterprises are able to achieve their goals by shifting from a commercial, on-premises system to a SaaS version. Many applications such as SharePoint have upgraded versions that run on the cloud. We help clients make transitions similar to moving from an on-site CRM to Salesforce or migrating to SharePoint Online from SharePoint 2016/2013 versions.
If you have recently upgraded an application, you might not be ready to invest in migrating it just yet. In such a case, you can choose to maintain status quo and revisit the application later. Also, not every application can benefit from cloud migration. We help you evaluate applications and move only those that make good business sense to migrate.
Sometimes enterprises are able to achieve their goals by shifting from a commercial, on-premises system to a SaaS version. Many applications such as SharePoint have upgraded versions that run on the cloud. We help clients make transitions similar to moving from an on-site CRM to Salesforce or migrating to SharePoint Online from SharePoint 2016/2013 versions.
If you have recently upgraded an application, you might not be ready to invest in migrating it just yet. In such a case, you can choose to maintain status quo and revisit the application later. Also, not every application can benefit from cloud migration. We help you evaluate applications and move only those that make good business sense to migrate.