Think again before starting migration to the cloud, as many organizations make mistake at the beginning without knowing their hardware, software and networking infrastructure. If you don’t follow the proper strategy then the migration can cause the non-preventive downtime hence causing more issues.

Approaching and doing cloud migration without a clear picture of your hardware, software and inventory infrastructure is like driving miles without the map and hence all this causes waste of lot more money.

Taking a hardware and software inventory

The main goal and approach behind having hardware and software inventory are to ensure and better understand what relies on what. It is helpful in determining the cloud migration process and knowing what needs to be migrated. Hardware and software inventory accounts for all servers, storage, security, as well as operating systems.

Taking a network inventory

Network inventory is more than your internet connection. A proper network inventory includes:

• Network capacity (WAN and Internet) by location
• Appliances including firewalls (both physical and virtual), switches, routers, and other capabilities
• Technology in use such as Ethernet, MPLS and “IP”
• In addition to the inventory, the organizations should create a topology map including IP address ranges showing WAN and internet uplinks.

Understanding your network inventory can be difficult because of couple reasons. First you need to ensure that your chosen CSP can meet all your network requirement workloads. This can help you determine which applications are the most bandwidth-intensive and which may need to remain only on-premises. In addition to all this, it’s very important to understand this for proper timing of cloud migrations.

It’s all too common to find organizations that can just “lift and shift” their existing workloads to the cloud. While in certain cases it is often possible to easily migrate the workloads to the cloud but in some, you need to perform extra efforts over the applications that need to be migrated over the cloud.

But before we access our applications, let’s see what other options do we have:

• Rehost: Otherwise known as “lift-and-shift” rehosting involves migrating workloads to the cloud without any code modification. This approach is quicker and requires less up-front resources. However, rehosting fails to take advantage of many of the benefits of the cloud such as elasticity. Additionally, it may be cheaper on-premises, rehosting is way more expensive than other approaches that optimize for the cloud.
• Replatform: Replatform involves small upgrades to workloads for the purpose of taking better care of the cloud than it would be in the case of rehosting approach. Replatforming is the better approachable way for the cloud migration, other benefits of cloud functionality and cost optimization without the heavy resource commitment of our next migration method.
• Refactor: The most involved approach of all, refactoring involves recoding and rearchitecting in order to take full advantage of cloud-native functionality. It is by far the most resource-intensive solution of not only just cost optimization but also cloud functionality.

Understanding which factor is suitable for you mainly begins with the assessment of your application/app. Is it a revenue-generating application that includes investing in it? If so, perform a cost-benefit analysis in order to determine the cost in terms of resources and downtime and the benefits the application needs to gain from replatform or refactor. And if the application doesn’t generate any revenue and just needs to be sustained then you can try replatform or rehost.

When coming up to the point of cloud migration, always try to remember these things in your mind. Otherwise, you can let yourself into trouble and make your task tougher hence slowing down the process of cloud migration. Choosing between rehosting, replatforming and refactoring is a complex undertaking. Fortunately, if you choose a better service provider then it will take the responsibility to take care of your workload. If you’re interested in learning more about what it takes about successful cloud migration, contact the experts at TechNEXA Technologies.