What is the best strategy to migrate to the cloud?
In another post, we talked about why to migrate to the cloud. This time we will talk about how to know which is the best strategy to migrate to the cloud.
The first thing that is recommended to do before migrating to the cloud is:
Select the right cloud infrastructure for your needs
This means that it will need to have the power to process, and the storage space to handle the workloads you have today.
Without mentioning the capacity and the power for the growth projections.
Vendor Price Assessment
Once the infrastructure is defined, we move on to see the prices of the cloud provider.
The one that best suits the budget and meets the system requirements that were worked on in the previous point will be evaluated.
Security
Decisions need to be made about cloud security and compliance, including cloud provider metering policies, where the data will reside (public cloud or private cloud), permission settings, encryption options, and much more.
And now, What should we do?
Once everything suggested above is resolved, it can be said that we are ready to go after a project plan to migrate to the cloud.
It’s important to note that when you have a clear and understood plan or strategy, it will be done much faster and cost much less than if we didn’t.
What is the best strategy or plan for cloud migration?
Some servers, such as Liquid Web, consider that the best plan or strategy is:
- Make a map detailing each part of the current infrastructure.
- Know what will be migrated and where
- What will happen to exist assets that will no longer be needed?
- We have to communicate and share this information with the parties involved, and it has to be done in time to take knowledge about what are their concerns. Based on this, We can make the changes that are needed.
Instead, other benchmarks, such as AWS, recommend the “6 migration strategies”, better known as “the 6 R strategies”.
What’s this about?
They are the most used in the market and are detailed below:
Rehosting – lift and shift
It consists of moving the applications without the need to make any changes. Such as large-scale legacy migrations, where organizations want to move quickly to meet their business goals.
These applications are usually rehosted, and the process can be automated with some cloud tools.
However, some prefer to do it manually, bc they find it easier to optimize or re-architecture apps once they are running.
Because they consider that the most complex part (migrating the application, data, and traffic) has already been done.
2. Replatforming — I sometimes call this “lift-tinker-and-shift.”
This plan or strategy refers to making “some optimizations” in the cloud.
For what?
To see the fruits of our labor tangibly.
This will allow the company to maintain the core application architecture and save money that would be spent on issues like licenses, electricity, etc.
3. Refactoring = Re-architecting
In this strategy it would be good to ask yourself:
Do I want to migrate from a monolithic to a service-oriented architecture?
What is a business need I have that would be difficult to achieve in the current infrastructure?
This strategy tends to be the most expensive, but it can also be the most beneficial if you have a well-positioned product in the market.
Repurchasing
Migrate from perpetual licenses to a software-as-a-service model. Moving a CRM to Salesforce.com, an HR system to Workday, a CMS to Drupal, and so on.
5. Withdraw
In this case, it would be good to ask yourself:
Which applications are no longer needed? What should I remove?
Once you have the answers, you need to know who the people affected or in charge of that area are.
According to AWS “it is estimated that between 10% and 20% of the enterprise, IT portfolios are no longer useful”.
This strategy can reduce the number of applications to protect and can be used as an engine to drive the business forward.
6. Retire = Revisit
Maintain business-critical applications that require major refactoring before they can be migrated. You can revisit all the apps that fall under this category later.
Amazon Web Services – AWS Migration White Paper
As you can see, it is important to asset what is good for your business before implementing it. That way, you will be optimizing time, money, and resources.
If you need to migrate or switch to the AWS cloud, at HADO, we can help you.
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