Cloud Migration Strategy - The Ultimate Guide to the 6 R's
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In today’s world, almost all industries are trying to reduce the costs of maintaining and managing their applications and infrastructure. However, the industries must necessitate quickly scalable infrastructure and high-end computing services. Industries realise the necessity to utilise the public cloud to achieve highly scalable services at a low cost. This is propelling public cloud providers like “AWS,” “Google Cloud Platform” and “MS Azure” to new heights.
The main cause behind the adaptation of the public cloud in any organisation is flexibility, security, scalability, flexible pricing, and other factors. The cloud’s cost structure consists of the Pay-as-you-go service, elastic IT-related capabilities, business agility, maximum uptime, and various service models such as SaaS, IaaS, and more that enable clients to control costs while ensuring dependable services are all part of the price structure.
What is a Cloud Migration Strategy?
The cloud migration strategy plays a critical part in any cloud transformation journey, and the success of the entire migration project is dependent on it. The hybrid and the multi-cloud assist in avoiding the vendor lock-in, and the single point failure is considered the right choice.
As per the research made by Gartner, major business customers are using at least two cloud service providers to run mission-important workloads and applications on public cloud, and this trend will continue in the coming years. Other advantages include high availability, service differences, disaster recovery planning, data security, cost savings, etc.
Why Do You Need Strategy Before Migrating To Cloud?
Adopting a cloud migration strategy aids in determining and executing the quickest, most cost-effective, and least disruptive migration from on-premises to the cloud. Furthermore, it can assist in determining which existing application workloads should be discontinued or replaced, which should remain on-premises, which should be rewritten, and which should be moved to the cloud platform to run as-is with native cloud services. It also helps determine which cloud is the best destination for which application. A business cloud migration plan will combine these approaches to handle the complete application portfolio.
What are the Benefits of a Cloud Migration Strategy?
- Decreased hosting costs
- Agility and scalability
- Decreased footprint
- Disaster recovery
- Security
The 6 R’s of Cloud Migration Strategy
1. Rehost
As the name indicates, this entails transferring the one stack from on-premises to the cloud hostings. You may transport the exact clone of your existing environment without making any significant changes for the higher return on investment. Rehosting is ideal for Industries with a conservative culture or short-term goals for leveraging modern cloud capabilities.
2. Replatform
Replatforming is a version of the lift & shift that requires making a few more changes to improve your landscape for cloud. The core structure of applications remains unchanged, and this is also an excellent technique for conservative firms looking to create cloud trust while gaining benefits such as improved system performance.
3. Repurchase
The term repurchasing means the application’s moving to the latest, cloud-native programs, basically a SaaS platform. The difficulty is losing your previous code’s familiarity and teaching your team on a new platform. If you’re migrating from the highly customised legacy landscape, the repurchasing might be the most cost-effective solution.
4. Refactor
Refactoring (alternatively known as rearchitecting) is the process of completely rewriting your apps. This is frequently motivated by a need to take advantage of cloud efficiencies that aren’t available in the current environment, like cloud auto-scaling computing. Refactoring is the most expensive alternative, but it is also most interoperable with future versions.
5. Retire
After evaluating your application portfolio for cloud readiness, you may discover that some applications are no longer useful. Start turning them off in this situation. The following savings may potentially strengthen your strategic plan for apps that are ready to migrate. It enables you to examine all of your apps regarding their functions, dependencies, and business costs. Because there is no migration, it is a very passive technique. According to Stephen Orban of AWS, when shifting to the cloud, up to 10% of an enterprise’s IT portfolio is no longer usable and can be turned off.
6. Retain
Retaining, also known as revisiting, is revisiting certain of your digital assets’ key applications that require major reworking before migrating to the cloud. You may eventually discover that some programs are better suited to on-premise deployments or have just been improved and must be kept. Other times, apps are kept because of compliance, regulatory limits, latency requirements, or simply because they are not cost-effective.
Best Practices for a Successful Cloud migration
- Know your IT portfolio inside out –the data, applications, and infrastructure
- Create a migration strategy.
- Choose the best partner for your cloud migration.
- Prepare your employees and your current IT infrastructure for the shift.
- For optimization, test and validate.
- Continuously monitor and track the migration process.
- Wherever practical, managed services and use automated tools from a cloud services provider.