Cloud migration: A guide to move to the cloud

Introduction

The move to cloud computing – cloud migration - has been one of the most notable technology trends over the past couple of years. While owning and running data centres used to be the standard, the amount of enterprise software operating on legacy servers and systems is likely to shrink significantly.

According to Google Cloud, over half of companies’ entire IT infrastructure resides in the cloud, while the remaining portion plans to onboard more of their workloads on the cloud soon.

While organisations were adopting cloud migration solutions even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the global health event added new urgency to their usage. Consequently, more businesses are quickly realising the true benefits of cloud migration services, given their ability to boost development speed and offer a near-limitless scale.

What is cloud migration?

Cloud migration stands for the process of transferring digital assets and operations – applications, data, and IT processes – from on-premise data centres or traditional infrastructure to the cloud. According to Gartner, the amount of new digital workloads that cloud-native platforms will manage will multiply by about 3X during 2021-2025.

In cloud environments, the vendor looks after the services and infrastructure, allowing businesses to focus on better serving their clients/customers, and on their other core competencies. While a cloud migration demands immense planning and preparation, it also holds the potential to transform the scale, scope, and efficiency of how businesses deliver value to their clientele.  

7 benefits of cloud migration

Cloud computing has rapidly become the backbone of businesses’ digital journey roadmap. According to McKinsey, organisations will spend 80 percent of their overall IT-hosting expenditure on cloud migration solutions by 2024.

Following are the succinct benefits of moving workloads to the cloud:

Resource scalability

With mergers or acquisitions, subsequent changes in workload requirements, or a sudden inflow of new users, businesses might need to deliver extra IT resources to their customers for general purposes. Having workloads in the cloud, businesses can quickly address peak demands and lower capacity whenever necessary.

Cost savings

With cloud migration services, the vendors look after all the essential hardware, security practices, and server maintenance, saving IT operations and maintenance costs. Besides, organisations cut operational expenses (OPEX) as their system administrators, and DevOps professionals no longer need to dedicate time to hardware maintenance and backups.

Furthermore, cloud migration services come with pay-as-you-use pricing – companies only pay for the solutions they use. Such a pricing model improves budget usage predictability and flexibility in the billing cycles of the service providers.

Improved workload performance

Compared to legacy IT architectures or data centres, cloud models implement behind-the-scenes maintenance, making outages a rarity. With cloud migration services, businesses can support several dispersed services across multiple clouds in data centres scattered globally. This significantly reduced network latency and its impact on the end-user experience, enhancing workload performance.

Operational flexibility

Cloud migration enables businesses and their operations teams to access data and applications anytime, anywhere – as long as they are authorised. That implies they can provide their workforces with a flexible schedule, allowing for a smooth transition to remote work.

By facilitating data accessibility, cloud migration is also helping businesses control authorisation to that data from the security perspective. Handling access controls well, instead of making it ‘free for everyone,’ helps employees collaborate better.

Reduced security and compliance risks

Cloud migration service vendors keep security and compliance on top; they tend to stay abreast with trends and updates. Additionally, they focus on technology, controls, and policies to strengthen businesses’ security footprint. These protocols weigh considerably more versus typical security measures of organisations, considering industry-centred compliance.  

Business continuity

Given the nature of cloud connections, the risk of disasters such as data centre outages or cybercrimes trims down. Besides, service providers are responsible for backups and disaster recovery, saving lots of hours for the IT team.

Automatic updates

With cloud migration solutions, companies can bank on their vendors to execute automatic updates. Indeed, there are now ready-to-use software updates that come with cloud migration packages.

Challenges of cloud migration

Cloud migration comes with its own spate of challenges. If not appropriately deployed, enterprises might incur losses rather than generate any business value. Following are the top issues related to cloud migration:

Vendor lock-in issues

Several enterprises are concerned about getting locked into a single cloud solution. While cloud vendors provide several services, most of them are not extendable to other cloud platforms, making the cloud-to-cloud switch a cost- and time-intensive process. Furthermore, companies are tied to the clauses in the service-level agreements (SLA), discouraging them from changing the cloud provider.

Disorganised planning

Transferring vital business assets and operations to the cloud requires diligent planning and analysis. However, most organisations do not explore enough to find the most suitable strategy. For instance, the lift-and-shift technique could be the fastest and least disruptive, but it might not work for every business-critical application.

Interoperability

Not all enterprise applications are compatible with the cloud environment. Some applications work better on a public or private cloud than a hybrid cloud; other applications require minor adjustments, while others might demand lengthy recording.

Initial deployment cost

Transitioning to cloud migration services will cut costs in the medium- and long-haul; however, users need to foot some initial setup investments:

• Direct costs: Hardware, agreements, and software licenses
• Administrative costs: Maintenance and labour
• Operational costs: Workforce coaching, payroll, and internal system management expenses

These costs are an obstacle for budget-conscious enterprises.

Skill shortage

Despite umpteen benefits of cloud technologies, their sophistication impeded several organisations in their journeys. One of the critical roadblocks is scouting skilled candidates who have the right and required capabilities to manage a successful cloud migration.

Concerns surrounding security and compliance

Sometimes, enterprises have second thoughts before outsourcing their classified data to third parties, despite the cloud environment being completely safe, and secure. This indecisiveness of organisations is more related to technology and application-centred concerns. Moreover, migrating large data chunks and setting access controls for applications creates significant exposure.

6 steps to cloud migration

Set migration objective

Businesses must determine the use cases that will drive their cloud migration, such as for DevOps, disaster recovery, or hosting the entire workload on the cloud.

Evaluate cloud readiness

Examining cloud readiness is another crucial step. Businesses must take a deep dive into their application infrastructure, its dependencies on the primary operating system (OS) devices, storage, and backup retention periods, as well as its data and workload needs.  

Perform cost analysis

Now, it is time to compare the performance and costs of running the workloads on-premises and the cloud. This entails the effort and time required to rewrite or replicate the application for the cloud transition. Additionally, organisations must consider their expenditures on hardware and software and their associated expenses, and the cloud vendors’ offered pricing structure.   

Choose the migration strategy

There are five common migration strategies:

• Rehost: Clone the applications and reinstall them to the cloud
• Refactor: Rewrite the entire application to make it cloud-native
• Re-purchase: Replacing traditional on-premise license with a cloud-based version
• Retire: Shutting down irrelevant applications
• Retain: Retaining applications on-site due to some reasons

Pick the suitable cloud model

Companies can select from private, public, or hybrid cloud models and consider their performance after migration.

Select the right vendor

The final step is looking for the right cloud service provider. While doing so, businesses must assess the provisions of each vendor and how they help with the business objectives.

Need help with cloud migration?

Tata Communications’ cloud migration services come with a holistic stack of resources that helps enterprises execute their cloud migration strategy with an organised, risk-aware approach for full-stack migration. Organisations can smoothly transfer heterogeneous workloads across all cloud models at near-zero downtime and minimal risk. We have over 300 certified cloud professionals in our arsenal who have migrated loads of on-site workloads to numerous cloud environments across diverse industries and use cases. Our experts kick-start cloud implementation by perusing a company’s resources to determine the most suitable cloud service and then devise a migration blueprint accordingly. Moreover, they are adept in various popular cloud environments, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Understand how Tata Communications’ cloud migration solutions negotiate the migration complexities. Contact our experts today.