Challenge in Not Moving to the Cloud 

Even today there are many enterprises centered on government, banking is hesitant in moving their on-premise data & applications over the cloud. This could lead to the loss of data control and difficulty in integration with the core applications, such as hindering the agility to respond to the new opportunities. 

Other consequences may include higher maintenance and costs for data center applications along with the security risk and an inability to keep pace with the new threats and protection measures. It has very limited capabilities for implementing modern applications and supporting new technologies. Not adopting cloud can cause an inability to capitalize on the potential business value of data and analytics because of inadequate storage. 

Cloud Migration  

Enterprise IT assets are growing at a fast pace day-by-day, based on the business domain, strategy, and IT vision. Management of IT assets mostly costs more than the core domain business. This makes the demand for migration of assets within an enterprise over the cloud with maximum business profit and minimal efforts. In order to achieve these many organizations are making an incremental approach. 

It is very important to remember that with any type of migration, whether it’s related to the cloud or not, one-time costs are involved. Some of the imperatives involved in cloud migration are: 

• Minimum investment and maximum return from IT so that IT resources can be scaled as per the requirement. 
• Achieve better business performance as per the market requirements and agility to change business requires, requires a change in IT with minimal investment. 
• Modernization of the applications to meet business targets built on business-technologies.
• Reduce total ownership of IT resources as compared to the business resources.

Assessing applications and workloads for cloud migration helps the enterprises to know which applications are capable of being migrated over the cloud without any hindrance. The decision criteria are defined to be the assessment progress. 

Cloud Migration Best Practices

Enterprise cloud migration depends upon a number of factors and this approach is multi-dimensional involving a number of elements. 

Change in Philosophy

One of the best practices recommended in the “cloud model” is to “design for failure”. This helps in creating proofs of the concept even for the small applications that need to be migrated over the cloud. Define the migration plan and then migrate the application to assess the gaps and craft a better migration plan. Don’t forget to test the workload and the resources like the storage, size, network bandwidth that are required for the cloud migration. Better to design a framework to ensure that cloud migration meets all the requirements and ensure a compatible cloud journey. 

Move Group Identification

Move groups are those applications that can be moved over the cloud. Move groups involve the logical grouping of applications that can be transferred over the cloud with a defined timeline. These groups are identical to both production and non-production environments. The applications in scope should be grouped together in Move Groups and should be migrated over the cloud within a defined timeline. 

At one time, more than one move group can run in one time and help in the completion of the other. You need to adopt the short- and long-term strategies in order to accomplish migration and business goals. 6 R’s are required in order to accomplish these goals which are as follows:

• Re-hosting: This will be done using automated tools or manually.
• Re-platforming: Determine the new platform and modify the underlying infrastructure.
• Replace: Move to a different platform.
• Re-architecting: Redesign the application and infrastructure using cloud-native features.
• Retire Decommissioning of the application.
• Retain: Continue to use the application in the current state.

Multi-Cloud Environment

This step involves whether the application will run on a single cloud or multi-cloud environment. A single cloud vendor leads to vendor lock-in, as moving applications to different vendors require more effort. The various models required for using multiple cloud providers are:

• One application in one cloud: One category of the application run in one cloud provider and the other runs in the other provider. This approach gives businesses more flexibility.
• Split application across multiple cloud providers: One part of the application runs in one cloud provider and the other runs in the other provider. This approach helps to leverage the advantage of every cloud provider.
• Cloud-agnostic application: These types of applications run on any cloud provider. The application simultaneously runs on multiple providers which give the flexibility to transfer and shift loads from one cloud provider to the other.

Automation 

Automation provides the ability to built infrastructure and automatically deploy applications without any downtime. During the migration of multiple applications organizations come across multiple patterns that need to be properly automated. It will cut down the migration time, provide more consistency and spread the automation so that they can see the proper benefit of moving to the cloud. Adopting a migration factory that leverages scheduling delivery and monitoring jobs can help in reducing the cost of labor, time and make professional migration over the cloud.

Data Migration

Conduct the required data assessment and complete the proper migration from production to the cloud. Enterprise sends the on-premise data to the cloud provider that needs to be uploaded over the cloud. This seems to be one of the best methods to migrate the data in bulk over the cloud. As a best practice, keep the dynamic data close to the computer and static data close to the user. This can be done by leveraging traditional caching techniques.

Summary

Moving your data on the cloud is inevitable. Migrating your enterprise applications to the cloud results in cost reduction or elimination, accelerates time to market and drive additional revenue. To know more about cloud and the migration of your data over cloud you can contact TechNEXA Technologies.