Cloud Migration

Cloud migration is the process of moving data, workloads, applications, systems or other business functions to a cloud computing environment. Cloud computing is rapidly becoming the new normal for organizations to host even their sensitive and critical data. The transition from enterprise IT to the cloud is basically driven by economic advantages for organizations of all size. Moreover, organizations should develop strategies when deciding to move to the clouds.

Organizations may adopt the following cloud migration strategies:

• Rehosting or “lift and shift”: involves using “Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)” and organizations may simply redeploy their existing data and applications on the cloud environments.
• Refactoring or “lift, tinker, and shift“: happens when organizations tweak and optimize their applications and systems for the cloud and employs “Platform as a service (PaaS)” service model.
• Revising: This strategy requires significant changes to the architecture and code of the systems or applications to be moved to the cloud. This strategy involves partially rewriting or expanding the code base, then deploying it by either rehosting or refactoring it.
• Rebuilding: Rebuilding strategy takes the Revising approach even further by discarding the existing code base and replacing it with a new one. This strategy involves rewriting and re-architecting the applications and systems from the ground up on a PaaS provider’s platform.
• Replacing: This strategy involves migrating to a third-party, prebuilt or native application provided by the vendor. Furthermore, organizations can also opt to discard their legacy systems and applications altogether and switch to already-built “Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)” applications from third-party vendors.

Cloud migration process employs the following steps:

• Planning
• Migration business case development including roadmap
• Cloud data migration execution
• Ongoing maintenance

Benefits of cloud migration include the following:

• Scalability or elasticity
• Cost savings
• Performance gains
• Increased flexibility and agility
• Transition from CAPEX to OPEX
• Security and compliance
• Enhanced efficiency
• Mobility or portability

Some challenges of cloud migration include the following:

• Lack of strategy
• Interoperability
• Migration cost management
• Vendor lock-in
• Skill shortages
• Voluminous data to migrate
• Security and compliance issues
• Compatibility challenges
• Choosing cloud services