What are the top cloud migration strategies?

Migration is always been the best way out of human expression whenever they

seek dignity, security, and feasibility. Similarly is the case with our technology.

Cloud is booming and organizations are looking for the best practices to migrate

their data and information. They are seeking cloud migration to avail best

services and simultaneously even hiring a cloud migration specialist to ensure a

smooth journey.

Cloud migration is the process of transferring resources such as data,

applications, services, etc. to the cloud. To implement the migration, you need

to understand different types of cloud migration strategies. Hence, in this post,

we are discussing:

● What is cloud migration strategy?

● Why should you use a cloud migration strategy?

● What are the best cloud migration strategies?

Let’s discuss them one by one!

What is cloud migration strategy?

A cloud migration strategy is a high-level strategy adopted to move/migrate

existing applications, data, or services into the cloud. A successful cloud

migration strategy would include prioritizing workloads for migration, creating a

corrective action plan, determining the necessary changes, developing a pilot,

testing pre-migration, adjusting the strategy as per the challenges, and working

out the right migration procedure. While implementing the strategy, a document

is created to guide teams through the migration process and facilitate roll-back if

necessary.

Why should you use a cloud migration strategy?

Adopting a cloud migration strategy helps in identifying and executing the lowest

cost, fastest, and least disrupted on-premises migration to the cloud. It helps in

determining which existing or ongoing application workloads can be replaced or

discounted or which application stays to move to the cloud. Basically, a cloud

migration strategy includes a combination of all approaches to address and

administer the entire application portfolio.

Though each company has its own set of requirements to run the migration

process, a cloud migration strategy identifies them and tailors them to their

particular needs with a motive to achieve the desired outcomes and results. This

process requires knowledge and thus, a cloud migration specialist ensures the

achievement of migration goals and provides visibility into the TCO and ROI of

undertaking a migration.

6 Top Cloud Migration Strategies

There are six best cloud migration strategies you should know while running the

migration process. These are:

Rehosting

This is the most common type of cloud migration strategy, also known as the

‘life and shift’ strategy. It’s known for migrating a direct copy of the existing

infrastructure directly to the cloud. This strategy is ideal for small organizations

having simple workloads who are still figuring out their long-term plans for their

services and scalability. The strategy is ideal for businesses whose infrastructure

is dependent on virtual machines.

There is one challenge you can face using this strategy is that it fails to take into

consideration when it comes to flexibility. Though rehosting cloud migration

strategy takes the least time for execution, it proves to be expensive in the long

run.

Replatforming

This strategy is known as the ‘move and improve’ strategy’ which involves

minimum charges to prepare for the migration to the cloud. The strategy is

perfect for organizations that have already planned to scale up their services or

solutions and are looking into performance on the cloud. But the challenge

comes when companies fail to utilize all benefits of the cloud.

Repurchasing

Sometimes while migrating the cloud strategies, portions of new application

architecture become difficult to maintain cost-wise and prove impossible to scale

up the business. In such cases, you completely shift the cloud strategies into

already existing cloud solutions to save prices. The approach is cost-effective if

things are really getting out of your hands. This approach might require training

for employees to work with this concept by a cloud migration specialist which

takes resources and time.

Refactoring

It’s like rebuilding the entire existing infrastructure from scratch to make it

ready for cloud migration. Organizations choose this strategy if they are looking

to take leverage of all cloud benefits such as serverless computing and auto-

scaling together. Both of these features are difficult to achieve together with an

ongoing premises setup. This approach creates a tough call for the cloud

migration specialist, programmers, and leadership to re-architect existing code

and its framework. Though it allows organizations to utilize the cloud benefits at

the maximum level. But recreating the whole structure from scratch takes time

and resources. Hence, this strategy becomes the most expensive strategy in the

long run.

Retiring

This cloud migrating strategy is generally adopted by large organizations as it

becomes difficult for them to transfer all components of infrastructure at large

scales. It involves unnecessary expenditure and invokes security vulnerability as

well. In such scenarios, it's better considered to retire these components and not

move them to the cloud. The approach ultimately saves costs and increases

security at the same time.

Retaining

There are times when modules of the existing infrastructure may not coordinate

with the cloud platforms in the market. In short, they are not compatible with

cloud resources. Hence, it manifests in the form of data that can not be migrated

for compliance reasons or it might take extra capital to build the architecture. In

such scenarios, organizations are hardly in a position to retain their entire

infrastructure. Hence, they seek a hybrid cloud solution.

Conclusion:

Like any digital strategy, a cloud migration strategy requires complete focus,

careful planning, resourcing, and testing. When companies are planning to move

to the cloud, the stakes are high. Hence, the process needs to be kicked off in a

perfect manner with the help of a cloud migration specialist. A cloud migration

strategy is good when both business and operations are secure from the get-go

and the organization is able to leverage the benefits without any hassle.