Demand for cloud computing services is growing rapidly, and estimates suggest it makes up 14.2% of global enterprise IT spending. In fact, according to Gartner, spending on public clouds reached $304.9 billion in 2021, up nearly 20% from the year before.
Users and companies are discovering more of the benefits clouds offer, such as seamless scalability, simplified business continuity, and cost-effectiveness.
However, cloud migration can be challenging; you’ve got to maintain availability during the move, ensure integration with existing systems, and even find the right cloud consulting company to help guide you through the process. Fortunately, the right planning can make any migration to the public cloud more efficient, safe, and reduce the risks associated with the move.
So, we created this simple guide to public cloud migration. It’ll help guide your IT organisation or company through the four key phases of the migration process: assess, plan, migrate, and optimise.
What is public cloud migration?
First, it’s important to establish what migrating to a public cloud actually means! In a nutshell, public cloud migration is the process of moving your company’s digital business operations and assets into a public cloud, hosted by one of the various providers, such as AWS or Azure.
It’s like a physical move, except you’re moving data, applications, IT processes, and workflows from one data centre to a public cloud data centre. You can move everything from an on-premise data centre to a third-party cloud vendor’s data centre or from one public cloud to another.
Much like a physical office move, it requires a lot of preparation, but it’s usually worth it. Companies can save money, time, and resources by using a public cloud and enjoy greater flexibility and scalability for their workforce.
Is migration to public cloud right for my business?
Before we delve into our go-to public cloud migration strategy, it’s well-worth identifying whether it’s the right solution for your business. For instance, have you considered:
- Cost: When managed effectively, migration to public cloud can be incredibly cost-effective. But have you weighed up the value of pay-as-you-go computing?
- Security: Have you identified a secure public cloud provider, who’ll keep your data safe and protected?
- Loss of control: Are you prepared for the potential loss of control that comes from migrating to the public cloud – as opposed to the full autonomy you may have with in-house or private cloud?
- Vendor lock in: Many businesses experience vendor lock in, which occurs when you become reliant on a particular provider and their services. This can make it harder to move to another virtual environment in the future.
We’ve gone into the above in more detail within another article, exploring key public cloud considerations and concerns. But if you’re still happy to learn more about executing a public cloud migration strategy, read on and discover the four key phases of the process.
1. Assess your teams and infrastructure
Migrating to the cloud is a team exercise, so you’ll first-need to identify the stakeholders and determine their involvement level.
Secure early involvement from key members
For example, getting members of the security and applications team involved early in the migration process can help identify, remediate, or bypass issues that might’ve occurred mid-migration. Hold information sessions with these key players to review the organisation’s cloud strategy, to forecast their roles and efforts in the overall migration initiative.
Identify the applications you’ll need to migrate
Next, you’ll need to identify the applications slated for migration to the public cloud. Since most companies use hundreds or even thousands of applications every day, a priority list of the apps that should be moved first can help.
To determine priority, look at all the variables you can, including:
- Application dependencies
- Cloud-readiness of apps and systems
- Relevant service level agreements (SLAs)
- Existing physical and virtual infrastructure
- Server details such as names, IP addresses, number of virtual machines per application, resource usage, licences, and more.
A questionnaire that outlines the needed information can help application owners evaluate migration readiness and centralise the relevant information needed during the migration.
2. Plan your migration strategy
More precisely, you’ll need to pick the public cloud migration strategy for your organisation. There are three main cloud migration strategies you can use:
- Rehost:
You can redeploy applications to the cloud without making substantial changes. Also known as “lift and shift,” you simply redeploy your existing data and apps on the cloud server.
It’s a good option for organisations that are less familiar with cloud environments, as well as applications where it’s difficult to modify the code and simple apps with few integrations and dependencies.
Challenges: Choosing rehosting as your public cloud migration strategy can present unexpected complications, as the apps may suffer from latency or performance issues because they weren’t optimised before migration.
Failing to accurately map application requirements to the corresponding cloud configuration can also cause problems, since legacy applications are often not scalable and don’t allow for distributed workloads as cloud apps do.
- Replatform:
Also known as refactoring or revision, with this public cloud migration strategy, you can optimise and modernise the applications before moving them to your virtual environment, so they take better advantage of cloud-based features and functionality without changing the core architecture.
For example, you might change how the application interacts with databases to leverage auto-scaling and dynamic managed storage. It’s a good strategy for organisations looking to transition to the public cloud in phases or smaller stages; you can move some workloads to the cloud, experiment and test, learn from mistakes, and then move to other applications.
Challenges: Scope creep can turn a small replatforming public cloud migration into a full-blown one and requires strict scope management to prevent unnecessary changes from derailing the project.
Likewise, it’s easiest to replatform apps with common, well-known cloud components, since they already have the features and technical requirements needed.
- Rebuild or Replace:
Sometimes, it’s not worth migrating complex or outdated applications to the cloud, so rebuilding them from scratch is the only option. This solution should only be considered when the existing application no longer meets your business needs.
Another option is to replace the existing app without building a new one in-house. You’ll replace the existing app functionality with a third-party, pre-built app provided by a vendor and only migrate the app data instead.
Challenges: Rebuilding an app from scratch is time-consuming and resource-intensive, and that’s before you migrate it to the cloud. Plus, you’ll increase your DevOps complexity and workload with each build, as you commit, update, and test.
Data migration planning
So, you’ve identified your public cloud migration strategy; but remember, migrating an application also means migrating all the associated data too. You’ll need to know how much data is associated with each migrating application, where it’s stored, and how frequently it’s updated.
This information will help you plan the optimal time to migrate the data with the least impact. Consider using data migration tools to keep the data synchronised during the migration and through the cutover to the new, cloud-based application, such as IBM InfoSphere, Oracle Data Service Integrator, AWS Data Migration, and Talend Open Studio.
If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed, get in touch with our team who’ll be more than happy to run you through the benefits of each solution!
Migration test planning
The final step in the planning phase is testing the applications once they’ve been transitioned to the public cloud (before they’re made available to users). It’ll give you a chance to evaluate the migration, check the performance, and make any necessary adjustments before going live.
Key cloud components to verify include all cloud managed services (DNS services, backups, etc.,), security settings, network connections, and ensuring your configuration meets the cloud environment prerequisites.
3. Migrate to the public cloud
By now, you’re ready to make the move to the cloud. Be sure to review the results of each move and adjust plans as necessary.
A key option at this stage would be a migration solution that lets you revert to your existing application and configuration at any time. It reduces your migration risk by providing a safety net to return to where you can make adjustments to and retry the migration.
Follow the plan you decided on previously and move forward when all public cloud migration milestones are met.
4. Optimise your public cloud
The migration team’s work isn’t done once you’ve completed the move, especially in the early days of cloud usage! You’ll want to fine-tune the cloud environment based on usage or adjustments you made immediately after the migration.
Enjoy a fully-flexible environment
For example, the cloud gives you more flexibility to provision instances and adjust their type and size based on real-time demand. Cloud vendors are also always updating their apps and services and adding new features, so it pays to stay updated on the latest news to discover other features or options you could be using.
Optimise maintenance workflows
For phased public cloud migrations, optimisation will continue as apps are migrated and brought online. IT teams will need to revise their maintenance and monitoring workflows to properly manage things like security, performance, backup, and disaster recovery. Business teams and leaders will need visibility into costs and SLAs to ensure cost-effectiveness and alignment with departmental budgets.
Prepare for post-migration investment
You’ll notice that migrating to the public cloud requires more investment up-front than after the actual migration.
But when you think about the various different public cloud migration strategies, it makes sense – especially for large organisations. They’re investing in the cloud to streamline workflows and reduce ongoing IT efforts, but getting there requires a little investment at the start to ensure success.
How to ensure data security when migrating to a public cloud
Migrating to the public cloud offers numerous benefits, such as scalability, cost-efficiency, and increased agility. However, it’s never been more important to prioritise data security – especially during the transition process.
Best practices to ensure strong data security include:
- Perform a comprehensive risk assessment
- Encrypt your data at rest and in transit
- Implement access controls and authentication
- Choose a reputable cloud service provider
- Create a data backup and disaster recovery plan
- Monitor and audit your cloud activity
- Train employees on cloud security best practices
- Regularly update and patch systems
- Conduct penetration testing
- Maintain compliance with regulations
Hopefully, you now feel confident ahead of your transition to public cloud, and you’re ready to use these four steps to ensure your migration goes smoothly!
Of course, if you’ve any questions about the cloud, or for help designing the right migration strategy for your organisation, reach out to our team of handy and experienced cloud consultants today. Or, for more interesting insight, explore our full cloud blog – including how to plan a private cloud migration.
