Key cloud migration considerations
The business case has been made and your project resources have been designated for cloud migration. Now is the time to scope and plan the migration. Moving your company’s IT workloads to the public cloud is a big decision and immediately alters the way your business operates. It has to be approached strategically and should not be taken lightly. There are many benefits to IT in the cloud, but you must deliberate and plan carefully. The wrong decision will cost you more than you would like to calculate.
Many thoughts must have crowded your mind like, which of the cloud service providers best suits your needs? How would you calculate the cost of cloud migration and operation? How can you guarantee the continuity of the service during and after the move? What kind of security measures should you take and what should you prepare for? How can you ensure regulatory compliance? There are many more questions you need to answer before moving to the cloud.
In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most pressing issues to consider when planning your move.
Private, public or hybrid?
One of the first things to decide when moving to the cloud is whether it will be private, public, or hybrid.
In a private cloud, you will have a dedicated infrastructure for your business, managed by your teams or by third-party providers. Your organization will have its own dedicated hardware, running on your private network and located on or off premises.
A public cloud provides its services over a network that is not private and is available for others to use. It is typically off-site and provides a pay-as-you-go billing model that could result in a cheaper solution, once you efficiently share resources between different clients.
Hybrid cloud combines your traditional or private information technology (IT) with a public cloud. It is typically used to scale up and down your infrastructure systems to meet seasonal business demand needs, spikes, or financial shutdowns, or to handle application other than data storage, such as configuring the application layer in a public environment (such as software as a service) while storing confidential information in a private one.
Current utilization of infrastructure
This is definitely one of the things you want to evaluate when considering a move to the cloud. In traditional IT, companies often buy their hardware based on peak usage to avoid problems when these scenarios occur. By doing that, organizations can end up with underutilized equipment, which could result in a huge loss of money. Taking a look at your performance and capacity reports can help you address these cloud workloads and decide whether to free up unused capacity for other workloads or simply move it and avoid further investment.
Cloud workload analysis
Of the IT workloads running in your data center, some may not be suitable for moving to the cloud. It’s not always easy to generalize the criteria for selecting the right applications to migrate, but you must consider all aspects of the runtime environment. Given the provider’s promised service parameters, can you achieve the same level of capacity, performance, utilization, security, and availability? Could you do it better? Can you afford less?
Your future growth should be factored into the decision. Can the cloud infrastructure scale as resource consumption grows? Will your application be compliant with regulatory standards when hosted in the public cloud? How does the cloud infrastructure address compliance, if at all?
To make the right decision, you need to fully understand your current workloads and determine to what extent your requirements can be met, both for current and future evolution.
App Migration Approaches
There are various degrees of changes you may want to make to your application depending on your short-term and long-term business/technical goals.
Virtualization – This model facilitates quick and easy migration to the cloud, as no application changes will be required. Ideal candidate for legacy applications.
Application Migration – In this case, your application will undergo minimal architecture and design changes to make it optimal for a cloud deployment model. For example, you can choose to use a No SQL database available in the cloud.
Application Refactoring – This model will require a major overhaul of your application directly from the architecture. This is usually done when you want to take advantage of the latest technology.
Backup and disaster recovery policies
How are your backup policies working today? Do they fit your cloud provider? This is also an important point that organizations need to consider carefully. Cloud providers may have standard backup policies with some level of customization. They’re worth checking out and seeing if they’re right for your business before they become a potential roadblock. You’ll need to pay attention to retention frequency, backup type (such as full, incremental, etc.), and version control.
Disaster recovery and business continuity are important even for the smallest companies. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) are important values that define the amount of data you are willing to lose and the amount of time you are willing to allow data to be restored.
License
Is the application licensed per VM, per core, or for total infrastructure space? This can have massive cost implications. If the licensing model requires all available resources to be taken into account, even if they are not assigned to the customer, the license costs will increase if they are migrated to a public cloud platform. Similarly, if the application is licensed on a per-core basis and the cloud provider does not offer the ability to configure your cloud environment on a per-core basis, this will have an adverse impact on the cost of the license.
Integration
Organizations often discover application dependencies too late in the workload migration process, leading to unplanned outages and limited system functionality while these dependencies are resolved. Understanding the relationships between applications is critical to planning the sequence and manner in which cloud migrations occur. Can the cloud application exist in isolation while other systems are migrated?
Supported operating system
Clouds are all about standards, and you need to keep your operating systems and middleware versions up to date when you intend to migrate them to a cloud provider. You should be aware that Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) do not support operating systems that are End of Life or being phased out. The same is likely to apply to your middleware and databases.
We hope this post will help you make decisions about your migration to the cloud.