6 Cloud Migration Strategies: Choosing the Right One

Introduction 

These days, more and more companies are opting for digital transformation. As a result, there is a tectonic shift toward frameworks and tools that create efficiency and improve the bottom line. Businesses today realize cloud’s benefits that enable economies of scale by removing redundant tasks and reducing operating costs.

However, it is always easier said than done. In one of our earlier articles, we discussed how migrating from an on-prem environment to the cloud requires a systematic well-thought-out plan. This article outlines six common cloud migration strategies while providing insights on key considerations and factors to help choose the right one.

 

Common Cloud Migration Strategies

1. Rehosting

Typically referred to as the lift-and shift technique, a Rehosting strategy involves migrating applications partly or fully from an on-premises setup to a cloud-based infrastructure without the need to redesign the application architecture.

Strategic Purpose

Rehosting helps companies get up and running quickly without the need to make extensive changes. 

When to choose this strategy

Rehosting is often used where monolithic applications form a considerable part of the entire workload. Besides, a key factor in choosing this migration strategy is specifically when there is a need to scale the migration as fast as possible with minimum business disruptions. For organizations that are hesitant and are experimenting with cloud capabilities without getting into long-term plans, Rehosting is recommended as the justified approach. Additionally, for organizations that prefer to use a blended model of both on-prem and cloud, Rehosting turns out to be a sensible choice.

2. Replatforming

Often known as the lift-tinker-and-shift approach, a Replatforming migration strategy is a variation of the Rehosting approach that optimizes workloads and applications before moving them to the cloud. 

Strategic Purpose

Replatforming enables companies to upversion applications while retaining the core application architecture. Where upversioning involves rewriting application codes as necessary changes that optimize its usage in the cloud. A typical example of this is migrating database servers from on-prem to a cloud-based Database-as-a-Service offering. In this case, to support a DBaaS model, the database requires application codes to be rewritten, however, its underlying business logic and core architecture are retained by following a Replatforming strategy.

When to Choose this Strategy

Chosen by organizations who want to modernize some aspects of their applications to take advantage of cloud benefits like scalability and elasticity. However, organizations must be mindful of the considerable effort, time, and money that is incurred as part of the migration.

3. Refactoring

Refactoring is a better-fit strategic approach that involves making extensive modifications to the legacy application architecture and a large portion of its codebase for an optimum fit into the cloud environment.

Strategic Purpose

Refactoring aims to improve the existing application and implement features that could be difficult to achieve with the current way the application is structured. Rewriting the existing application code also helps organizations enable better resource utilization for workloads that would otherwise be expensive to rehost in the cloud. 

When to Choose this Strategy

Organizations that want to migrate legacy applications can take advantage of the higher cost benefits this migration approach provides. It is also suitable for businesses that want to add additional features to their applications that leverage niche cloud utilities that improve performance to meet business requirements. Adopting cloud services such as Serverless Computing, High-Performance Data Lakes, etc. are some of the commonly known factors to choosing this model.

4. Repurchasing

Known as the drop-end-shop approach, the Repurchasing migration strategy involves moving from on-prem to a cloud setup by scrapping existing licenses and starting up with newer ones to fit the cloud model. Commonly used for adopting a SaaS-based version of an application that provides the same features of the application, though work in a cloud-based subscription model. 

Strategic Purpose 

This approach to cloud migration helps organizations migrate from a highly customized legacy environment to the cloud as effortlessly as possible with minimal risk. This involves retiring the current application platform by ending existing licenses and then renewing newer ones that support the cloud.

When to Choose this Strategy

A Repurchase strategy can be chosen when dealing with proprietary platforms or products not designed to operate on cloud infrastructure. A typical example is the migration of an on-prem HR application to Workday on the cloud or using a SaaS-based database service such as Airtable.

5. Retiring

This approach involves retiring or turning off parts of an organizational IT portfolio that are no longer useful or essential to the business requirements.

Strategic Purpose

Retiring specific services that are either redundant or a part of the legacy stack improves cost savings. This involves identifying applications, tools, or services that are no longer scalable or negatively impact other aspects of an efficient framework, including security, resilience, and interoperability.  

When to Choose this Strategy

Organizations must choose this migration strategy after doing a thorough evaluation of all applications, IT services, and data management tools. A common rule of thumb is to evaluate retiring services with a valid business justification and not just for the goal to embrace modern technology. 

6. Retaining

The Retaining migration strategy involves only migrating a part of the legacy applications, tools, and platform components that support migration to the cloud. Essentially this implies the components that cannot be Refactored or Retired are Retained within the on-prem setup, while the rest is migrated to the cloud. 

Strategic Purpose

The retain approach to cloud migration allows organizations to maintain or keep parts of their IT portfolio on-premise while applying a part-migration method to run cloud applications.

When to Choose this Strategy

A Retaining migration model is often chosen alongside another migration strategy. Organizations with obligatory compliance or regulatory requirements that demand to store or run some aspects of their IT portfolio within certain regions or on-prem.

Cloud-migration-strategies 6 Cloud Migration Strategies: Choosing the Right One

Key Considerations to Choosing a Cloud Migration Strategy

Choosing a migration strategy requires careful consideration of critical factors that have the potential to affect core business objectives. As a rule of thumb, it is advised that organizations consider the following before choosing one of the cloud migration strategies:

  • Current on-premise workload: Although the cloud promises scalability and efficiency, it might not be suitable for running certain workloads without adequate refactoring. As a result, organizations must carry out a thorough analysis of what applications to migrate and in what order. This process helps to decide the most efficient way to migrate to the cloud.
  • Security: The transition process poses unique security challenges and risks that organizations need to be cautious of. Being aware of such challenges helps organizations perform due diligence in choosing the right cloud provider and a migration strategy.

In the absence of the right skill sets and expert guidance, migrating to the cloud is never easy. This is particularly complex for organizations that are trying to take advantage of the cost-efficiency, scalability, and elasticity of a cloud model without knowing the unknowns. 

 

At Optimus, we take pride in having supported several clients in their journey to digital transformation and migration to the cloud. Contact us today to know more. 

 

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Cloud Migration: Common Challenges and Recommendations

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SL-101820-36860-11-1030x687 Cloud Migration: Common Challenges and Recommendations

Introduction

It is estimated that today more than 90% of companies are already using some form of cloud services, while by 2023, the public cloud market is projected to reach $623.3 billion worldwide. These statistics highlight the consistent emerging pattern of businesses migrating their infrastructure from on-premises to the cloud. Industry pundits also claim that it’s no longer a question for companies to ask if they should move to the cloud but rather when.

There are several reasons to it. Adopting the cloud offers improved data access, scalability, and application security while achieving enhanced operational efficiency. A projection by Oracle also predicted that companies can save up to 50% on infrastructure expenses by deploying workloads to a cloud platform. 

However, transitioning to the cloud comes with its own set of challenges, with a disclaimer that not every cloud migration project goes as smoothly as intended. While there are a number of factors to failure, a lack of planning and insight before cloud migrations are one of the most prominent reasons for an outright failure. This not only means that the organization’s long-term goals to improve operational efficiency goes for a toss but also result in wasted effort, time, and money.

This article addresses the most common challenges to expect when moving from an on-premises setup to a cloud platform, and how to overcome them.

Common Challenges of an On-Prem to Cloud Migration

As an essential best practice, organizations are required to diligently research and assess the most suitable processes, methodologies and plan every step of the migration to ensure the right decisions are made, and costs are controlled. Here are some key considerations that should be followed as the rule of thumb. 

Choosing the Right Model and Service Provider

Choosing the right cloud model for a business and the right service provider can not only make or break the migration project, but also affect its future maintenance and sustainability. 

There are 3 cloud models that require an assessment to ascertain the best fit for the company:

  • Public Clouds are the most popular choice where a service provider owns and manages the entire platform stack of cloud resources – which are then shared to host a number of different clients. Some common examples of such managed service providers are MS Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.
  • Private Clouds, on the contrary, don’t share computing resources as they are set up specifically for exclusive use by a single organization. Compared to public clouds, such a framework offers more control over customized needs and is generally used by organizations who have distinct or specific requirements, including security, platform flexibility, enhanced service levels, etc.
  • Hybrid Clouds are a blend of a public/private cloud used with an on-premises infrastructure. This allows an organization to interchange data and applications between both environments that suit its business process or technical requirements. For businesses that are already invested in on-site hardware, a Hybrid cloud model can ease a gradual transition to the cloud over a long-term period. Additionally, for businesses that are too reliant on Legacy applications, a Hybrid cloud model is often perceived as the model that provides the leeway to adopt new tools while continuing with traditional ones. 

Challenges-of-Cloud-Migration-e1617044236232 Cloud Migration: Common Challenges and RecommendationsImage source: Intel.com

Apart from the cloud model, when it comes to selecting a service provider, there are key factors to consider such as 

  • how the data is secured, 
  • Agreed service levels and the provision to customize them, 
  • a guarantee of protection against network disruptions, and 
  • the costs involved. 

It is important for an organization to be mindful of vendor lock-in terms, as once the transition starts with migrating data, it can be difficult and costly to switch providers.

What is recommended?

Plan exhaustively on analyzing the current and future architecture, security, and integration requirements. Be clear about the goals of migrating to the cloud and identify the vendors that will most likely help in achieving them. A best practice of choosing the preferred service provider often starts with evaluating the proposed Service Level Agreement (SLA) for maintenance commitments, access to support, and exit clauses that offer flexibility.

Engagement and Adoption from Stakeholders

When introducing changes within an organization, it is often met with resistance by multiple stakeholders, which can thwart efforts for a smooth switch. This can be explained by scenarios where – the finance department may oppose the transition because of cost, the IT team may feel their job security is threatened, or the end-users won’t understand the reason for the change and fear their services might get impacted. Though such resistances are usually short-term, such factors may often compromise an organization’s immediate goals unless stakeholders are onboard.  

What is recommended?

Dealing with stakeholder resistance requires a holistic change in mindset across all levels of the organization. While hands-on training and guidance may provide support for users in adopting and using cloud-based services, preemptively addressing any resistance is a start on the right foot. Additionally, as an advisory for various organizational units, it is suggested to build a compelling business case that highlights current challenges in the organization with clear explanations on how migrating to the cloud will resolve these issues. 

Security Compromise

Whether the underlying architecture relies upon on-premises or the cloud, protecting a company’s data remains a top priority for any organization. When migrating to the cloud, a large part of the organization’s data security is managed by the cloud service provider. As a result, it is vital to have a thorough assessment of the vendor’s security protocols and practices.

This also means that organizations remain in control of where the data is stored, how incoming/outgoing data is encrypted, what measures are in place to ensure software is updated with the latest fixes, as well as the regulatory compliance status of the provider. Certain enterprise cloud providers like MS Azure take a holistic approach to security and offer the highest industry security standards that are aligned with regulations like PCI and HIPAA. 

What is recommended?

Define in-house security policies and explore the available cloud platform’s security tools. As a result, it is critical to proactively consider: 

  • authorization & authentication, 
  • audit lifecycle, 
  • application and network firewalls, 
  • protection against DDoS attacks and other malicious cyberattacks. 

Besides, a secure cloud migration strategy should administer how security is applied to data in-transit and at-rest, how user identities are protected, and how policies get enforced post-migration across multiple environments. 

It is important to note that administering security across all layers and phases of implementation requires much more than using tools. This usually begins with:

  • an organization to foster a security mindset, 
  • adopting security as part of the workflow by embracing a DevSecOps model, 
  • as well as incorporate a robust policy and audit governance through Security-as-Code or Policy-as-Code methodologies. 

Avoid Service Disruptions

Legacy models that rely extensively on third-party tools which are through with sunset clauses, or in-house developed applications, require special provision for a smooth transition. More so, frameworks involving virtual machines that include hardware-level abstraction are practically more complex that syncs and maintains abstraction layers through pre and post-transition phases. Unplanned migrations for such setups may often lead to performance issues including increased latency, interoperability, unplanned outages, and intermittent service disruptions. 

What is recommended?

Replicating virtual machines to the cloud should be planned based on an organization’s workload tolerance, as well as its on-prem networking setup. It is advised to make use of agent-based or agentless tools available by service providers, such as Azure Migrate that provide a specialized platform for seamless migrations. 

As for legacy or sunset apps, organizations are advised to plan for Continuous Modernization that provisions regular auditing of such apps, while planning for a phased retirement in the longer term. For setups where an immediate Lift and Shift isn’t an option, the organization should recalibrate its migration strategy by considering Refactoring or Rearchitecting strategies, that reimplements the application architecture from scratch. 

Cost Implications

Accounting for near and long-term costs during cloud migration is often overlooked. There are several factors that require consideration to avoid expensive and disruptive surprises. As migration from a legacy to the cloud is gradual, in the immediate term, organizational units often need to continue using both on-premises as well as the cloud infrastructure. This implies additional costs towards duplication of resource consumption such as – data sync & integrity, high-availability, backup & recovery, and maintenance of current systems. 

What is recommended?

Over the longer term, using a cloud platform is more cost-effective. Though there is very little that can be done by an organization to avoid most of such expenses during migration, what is required is to include these within its financial projections. While doing so, expect there to be upfront costs related to the amount of data being transferred, the services being used, and added expenses that may arise from refactoring to ensure compatibility between existing solutions and the cloud architecture. 

Benchmarking Workforce Skills

A migration plan that doesn’t benchmark workforce skills is often considered flawed. Cloud migrations can get complicated with customized requirements, using new technologies, and assessing what systems and data will be moved. During this, a good chunk of the effort goes towards the analysis of existing infrastructure to establish what will work on the cloud and identify the future gaps with respect to in-house workforce skills. 

What is recommended?

Migrating to the cloud is a complex process that requires a unique set of soft and hard skills. Before transitioning, it is essential to understand what practical knowledge the team has with cloud platforms, and then take the necessary steps to upskill in relevant cloud technologies and security. An important consideration around this should also factor in the allocation of contingent funds towards setting up a consistent framework of skills upgrade for seamless adoption of emerging tools and practices.

Key Takeaways

Adopting a cloud framework today is more a necessity than a projected goal. While migrating to the cloud, an organization’s goal remains equally important to develop a migration strategy, that sets realistic expectations by undertaking thorough due diligence. Being aware of the challenges and how to address them, not only minimizes immediate risks, but also prevents the project from becoming a disaster in the longer run.

By the end of it all, the successful strategy determines how efficient the migration is, without a noticeable impact on productivity or operational efficiency.

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