Cloud Migration: modernizing IT
Living with your head in the cloud never made so much sense! Read our full article and find out how to get rid of costs and improve operations with Cloud Migration.
The Cloud has become a vital cog in helping businesses reopen, reinvent, and outmaneuver uncertainty and achieve end-to-end digital transformation.
Migrations are increasingly occurring within the Cloud as companies migrate between different Cloud providers.
More and more companies are accelerating their move to the Cloud, reinventing their offerings, and becoming more cost-efficient, agile, and innovative. Workers and consumers now want better user experiences in all aspects of their digital lives, and the Cloud can provide this.
But for those making their first initial foray into the Cloud, there are a few critical considerations to be aware of…
Read on to explore what Cloud Migration entails, how it can benefit your business, what some of the challenges are in making the transition, when is the right time to take the plunge, and how to decide on the best possible smooth transition Cloud strategy for your business.
What is Cloud Computing?
In essence, Cloud Migration is the process of relocating an organization’s data, applications, and workloads to a Cloud infrastructure. It is critical for achieving real-time and updated performance and efficiency – it’s all about that modernization!
Organizations may choose to relocate all of their computing assets to a Cloud; however, some applications and services remain on-premise in most cases.
There are several types of Cloud migrations a company can execute. Commonly, organizations use several Clouds, both public and private, in a hybrid environment that includes on-premise computing assets.
A typical model transfers data and applications from a local on-premises data center to the public Cloud. However, a Cloud migration could also entail moving data and applications from one Cloud platform or provider to another, known as Cloud-to-Cloud migration.
When considering a migrating to the Cloud strategy, like so many things in life, it’s essential to understand that it’s about getting there and what is done once you arrive.
That’s why the process of Cloud migration is making companies ask the question: what is the best approach to modernization?
It is a process that requires careful analysis, planning, and execution to ensure the Cloud solution’s compatibility with your business requirements. Still, when it is done correctly, the advantages are vast.
The benefits of Cloud Migration
As is our want and becoming a bit of a tradition here at MJV, let’s start the benefits rolling with some raw stats:
“4% of Tech Chief Financial Officers say cloud computing had the most measurable impact on their business.” (Forbes)
“Through 2022, the market size and growth of the Cloud services industry will be at nearly three times the growth of overall IT services.” (Gartner)
“94% of businesses saw an improvement in security after switching to the cloud, and 91% said the cloud makes it easier to meet.” (Dell)
The process of Cloud migration can have a massive impact as it becomes a flexible digital workplace set up to deal with the increase in online demand and remote working.
The advantages of a Cloud migration move are, unsurprisingly, essentially the same as the reasons to use the Cloud itself: to host applications and data in the most effective IT environment possible.
Often organizations migrate on-premises applications and data from their local data center to public Cloud infrastructure to take advantage of the substantial benefits, which generally fall into the following categories:
- Performance: Applications and websites hosted in the Cloud can quickly scale to serve more users or higher throughput and run in geographical locations near end-users to reduce network latency.
- Cost reduction: Companies that migrate to the Cloud can spend significantly less on IT operations as their Cloud provider takes over maintenance and upgrades of the service. Maintaining physical servers is less and less part of companies’ routine, especially in the 100% remote and digital world we live in—a significant differentiator of the Cloud. Corporations will only pay for the service used, reducing costs considerably.
- Scaling: Cloud computing can scale far more smoothly than on-premises infrastructure in supporting larger workloads. Traditional IT environments purchase and set up physical servers, software licenses, storage, and network equipment to scale up business services.
- Digital experience: Having a server crash can be a nightmare; the value of having a service that’s available 24 hours a day, 7-days a week, from anywhere in the world is priceless. Cloud services can be accessed by users from almost anywhere globally, whether employees or customers. This contributes toward digital transformation, enables an improved experience for customers, and provides employees with modern, flexible tools.
- Agility & Speed: The world is speeding up, and companies need to keep up with this agility not to be left behind. Through Cloud computing, the implementation of IT resources is much faster. Migrating applications to the Cloud allows companies to adopt affordable new technologies more efficiently.
- Unlimited Storage with zero data loss: With Cloud, the days of seeing: your database has exceeded its storage limit are a thing of the past. As the Cloud service is on-demand, more storage is always just a click away. Automatic backups to save the most sensitive and valuable data are much simpler and faster in the Cloud than on a physical server.
- Security: Last but definitely not least is the all-important safety aspect. Typically Clouds are secure environments that comply with relevant industry standards and government regulations, and they are protected through security solutions and tools, best practices, and policies.
Essentially, firms generally migrate workloads to a Cloud to improve operational performance and agility, workload scalability, and security.
So it’s a no-brainer? It’s all very self-explanatory, and we should all take the plunge and sign up for Cloud Migration today?
Wrong!
Hold your horses their partner; it is not as simple as that; there are several obstacles a company might face when joining the party.
What are the Cloud Migration challenges?
Cloud migrations can be complex and risky; even with a solid Cloud migration strategy, you can’t entirely eliminate all the hurdles and potential problems.
Usually, the more considerable hurdles fall into the following categories:
A weak lack of strategy
- Often, organizations migrate to the Cloud without devoting sufficient time and attention to their strategy. Rigorous end-to-end Cloud migration planning is necessary for successful Cloud adoption and implementation. Each application and dataset can have different requirements and considerations, demanding different Cloud migration approaches.
Expense management
- Many organizations do not have a set goal or understanding of spending or saving after migration. This could cause confusion surrounding if the migration were an economic success or not. Also, Cloud environments are dynamic, and costs can vary rapidly as new services are adopted.
Provider issues
- Cloud providers offer many services, but many of them cannot function on other Cloud platforms. Workloads from one Cloud to another can be lengthy, costly, and frustrating. Many organizations start using Cloud services but have issues and switch to another provider.
Training
- Don’t underestimate the staff training necessary with Cloud migration. Working with apps in the Cloud requires a different set of IT and management skills, and data security requires a whole different outlook.
Staff training needs to be a priority, and employee skill-sets must be considered to ensure everyone is fully trained to control and manage the relevant services.
Data security
- Probably the most widely known and discussed Cloud migration issue is the major obstacle of data security and compliance.
There is a “shared responsibility model” with Cloud services, where the provider takes responsibility for securing the infrastructure, and the customer is responsible for securing data and workloads. Therefore, the organization’s responsibility is to configure them correctly and ensure that all services and applications have the appropriate security controls.
Finally, The actual migration process itself also presents some security risks, as transferring large volumes of data, which may be sensitive, and configuring access controls for applications across different environments, creates significant exposure.
Not every application and organization is a good fit for the Cloud. Managers must scrutinize their on-premises applications when they make their choice about when and which applications should be moved to a Cloud environment.
When and how to kigrate to the Cloud?
Several factors influence an organization’s decision on when and whether to move to the Cloud. Broadly speaking, the Cloud plays a central role in most digital transformation initiatives.
As already mentioned, Cloud computing means taking a step forward and modernizing in terms of storing information. To migrate to Cloud computing, a company needs to be at a certain level of maturity, fulfilling some basic requirements.
This movement must be done with planning and strategy so that everything happens quickly, effectively, and safely.
Cloud computing ultimately liberates the enterprise IT team from the obligation of managing uptime. Having an application in the Cloud is often the most logical step toward growth.
When trying to decide whether to move or not, some or all of these questions may help in understanding a company’s readiness to move an app to the Cloud.
- Should your application stay or go? Legacy applications, or workloads requiring low latency or higher security and control, probably stay on premises or move to a private Cloud.
- What’s the cost to run an application in the Cloud? One of the primary benefits of a Cloud migration is workload flexibility. If a workload suddenly needs more resources to maintain performance, its cost to run may escalate quickly.
- Which Cloud model fits best? Public Cloud provides scalability through a pay-per-usage model, whereas private or on-premise Clouds offer extra control and security. Although performance and connectivity may suffer, a hybrid Cloud model provides the best of both worlds.
Choosing the best Cloud Migration strategy
Every organization’s business goals and context are different, and as a result, many Cloud migration and modernization scenarios will offer that individual company advantages and weaknesses.
A necessary starting point is to understand the pain points of your business. Take into consideration the age and maintainability of your legacy system when putting together a modernization strategy.
Then choose the Cloud platform that best suits the demands and create a corresponding architecture to execute the Cloud adoption plan.
For more on how to choose the best possible Cloud Migration Strategy, why not join us on April 13 for our 60min presentation on this very subject. It would be our pleasure to have you join us on this joint venture with Informatica.
Case MJV: migration and Cloud Computing journey in the financial sector
So what makes MJV a reference when it comes to Cloud? Well, here at MJV, we carry out Cloud migration projects, one of which was successfully run for a company in the financial sector:
Our challenge was to recreate the SAS environment in the AWS Cloud, as part of the company’s Cloud Journey, using Design Driven Data Science to map out the process.
After the mapping, the MJV data engineering team migrated the solution and cleaned the data.
After each process was migrated, users went through a period of coexistence of the two solutions.
They adapted to the new ecosystem safely, guaranteeing the reliability of the results generated by the new process until the processing could be turned off and the SAS license assigned to it could be removed.
The results were Cost reduction and Process optimization and one pleased finance company.
Clearly, we are covering a very dense topic and have merely scratched the surface of, in these, hopefully, well-written 2000 odd words. But If you would like more details about the MJV project mentioned above or have any queries about how best possible method of migrating to the Cloud, feel free to reach out to one of our team, who would be more than happy to talk you through your options.
When it comes to IT, modernization is crucial.
