3 Commandments for Successful Cloud Migration

By Cloud Computing Outlook | Thursday, September 10, 2020

"Organizations are moving their applications, workloads, and services to cloud without having a proper plan to optimize them and without evaluating whether it will work efficiently in the new environment"

Fremont, CA: Despite migrating to the clouds in search of benefits, many enterprise leaders still struggle to get the returns they expected while moving their workloads to the cloud. Experienced CIOs, technology consultants, and researchers cite a common reason for this struggle - lack of adequate planning. According to them, organizations are moving their applications, workloads, and services to cloud without having a proper plan to optimize them, and without evaluating whether it will work efficiently in the new environment.

To overcome this cloud migration failure, here are some tips on how to move workloads from on-premise to the cloud, in the most effective way.

Understand and Analyze the App

Before abruptly moving to the cloud, CIOs must consider some questions to analyze the application, like what does it offer: PaaS, IaaS, and cloud-native tools? Will it work in a virtualized environment? Is the application a modular design? What are the costs of applying automation to it? And finally, what are its impacts. If the answer to all these questions satisfies the needs and feasibility of the company, there is no looking back. Applications that don't support microservice, don't have automation, aren't cloud-native, or can't scale the orchestration, are certainly not the good option for cloud deployment.

Identify the Variables

No application works in isolation. Similarly, while the cloud migration process, the IT team needs to understand the process of how an application that is slated to move to cloud interacts with other systems, and what support do they require to work with those systems, etc. The IT team must redesign and modernize the app before moving it to the cloud.

Lift & Shift vs. Pilot Test

There are several use cases where the lift-and-shift process suits best. It is a more straightforward concept, where the complete application and software are shifted from the on-premise site to the cloud. But, that doesn't mean organizations underestimate the work needed before the lift-and-shift project. The complete process must be carried out by trained professionals to ensure that there occurs no disaster during the process.

On the contrary, there are some projects which need to be pilot tested before moving to the cloud. A pilot test is done to guard against any disruptions from problematic migrations and ensure business continuity. In the pilot test, the IT team checks the applications in the cloud before they fully migrate.