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   Quick guide to cloud migration

Many organizations have now ditched the one-time so popular on premises data centres, for the now highly revered capabilities of cloud.

Cloud migration entails the process of relocating an organization’s digital resources between locations with at least one being the cloud. Such resources include digital assets, data, databases, applications, services, etc. Digital resources can be moved from local data centers to cloud providers, from one cloud provider to another, and in some cases  from cloud to local data center. An organization may choose to migrate its resources in full or partially.

Commonly, organizations may choose to operate as a private cloud, public cloud or hybrid cloud. 

Private cloud also referred to as a data center is essentially run and controlled by the organization that owns the data and is not shared to the public.

Public cloud is held by large companies that offer its services to the general public, and usually on a subscription basis.

Hybrid cloud is a mix of both private and public cloud, in that an organization runs its resources both in private data center(s) and with public cloud providers.

What influences cloud migration?

There are a lot of reasons why a  company might want to migrate its resources to the cloud. Here are a few:

Cost reduction: Running an on premise data center might prove expensive for some organizations, depending on their needs and capital resources. In addition, certain cloud providers may have better price offerings, prompting one organization to consider making a switch. The cost of procuring hardware, maintenance and power for example is a strong factor which may influence migration.

Integration: It is possible that organizations may have complex infrastructure, computing or operation needs – and as such, would require resource hosting which meet the corresponding capabilities. So, for instance, cloud providers which are capable of handling such integrations will be prefered over others.

Ease of Access and Usability: The ease of use and access of resources may be a determining factor for cloud migration. Accessing an organization’s resources for use from a local data center for instance, might prove challenging if the center is working on overload or experiencing downtime, which is an important factor for smoothly running an organization at optimum efficiency. To ensure operational efficiency, an organization may choose to migrate to a cloud provider that solves this problem for them. It may be better to utilize public cloud providers because of their ability to employ their capital resources into providing better backend and support, which is usually much more than small sized companies.

Scalability: Ability to scale up or down resources based on workload size is a tangible asset for any cloud solution. On premise data centers possibly would not be able to scale up past its specification, but some public cloud providers would allow for it which is an essential offering for every organization.

Steps/considerations to guide your organization’s cloud migration

Cloud migration or any sort of migration at all is at its base, a very critical process to an organization. The right practices can lead to a successful outcome and the wrong ones could cost the organization immensely. This is why it is important that the IT team think and plan thoroughly, how to deploy this. these include:

  • present problems
  • expectations from migration
  • Resource assessment( applications, services, databases…)
  • backup options
  • Budget
  • Cost

Other commonalities

An organization’s applications may require some code modification. This is called refactoring an application. It is essential  to enable applications to run smoothly in a new cloud environment. When code modification is not done, it is referred to as lift-shift-migration.

Cloud migration testing

Stress testing an organization’s resources and services before and after migration is a worthwhile practice. This can help the organization in determining how to tackle the migration or whether to fully commit to a new cloud solution.

Security

Security threats may occur as a result of regulatory non-compliance, misconfiguration and API exposure, giving room to unethical exploitation of an organization’s cloud resources. Therefore, organizations should ensure that security measures in each process are adhered to when performing migrations.

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