The majority of modern businesses are moving their IT operations to the cloud. Such changes can bring the company a lot of benefits like cost reduction, a remarkable increase in profitability and efficiency and riding the hype wave.
Cloud migration is the compleх process that usually needs customization for each company. The best cloud migration strategy will be made by a Managed Service Provider (MSP) who already has experience in this field. A good example of a reliable MSP is IT Svit – https://itsvit.com/services/migration/cloud-migration/.
For successful implementation you should keep in mind the next stages of the cloud migration strategy:
- Build a cloud migration plan including implementation strategy. Usually, this step is made by a single specialist or by an MSP. The plan should outline all stages and list all the time and resources you will need.
- Choose a provider and the number of clouds. You might store your software on one cloud or use multi-cloud. Also, there are a lot of cloud providers and platforms you can use as your project destination.
- Complete software refactoring. If you need to make some urgent changes in the software you’d better make them before moving to the cloud. On this step you also need to decide, should you modify the application to use the cloud advantages somehow or not.
- Build the CI/CD plan. CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Deployment) are processes that can highly increase your project efficiency. They are part of the automatization which is one of the common reason to use cloud computing.
- Allocate resources. This step means you should efficiently allocate resources for scaling.
Today we will pay attention to the first step and discuss the best cloud strategies.
Cloud migration strategies
There are three basic strategies of cloud migration we will describe below.
- Lift-and-shift. This means moving to the cloud “as is”. This type of migration passes just as it sounds. You are exactly lifting and shifting your software to the cloud without remarkable changes. The software is deleted from the local environment and transferred to the cloud. Thus, three layers – operating system (OS), database (DB) and the application itself are unchanged.
- Technical migration. This strategy needs to change the BD and OS layers for deploying the application. In this case, the software maintains without changes. The technical migration can be both an independent and intermediate process. Sometimes it is used as a step for the next type of migration. On-prem versions of OS, DB and other software are replaced by their cloud variants or alternatives.
- Application migration. In this approach, all three layers need to be changed. Thus, you’ll have to make environment conversion, system transformation, and app implementation.
As you can see, migration to the cloud is quite an efficient instrument that needs a lot of attention and requires following some rules. There are some risks in moving to the cloud. The most common of them are related to security and data losses. It is very important to keep all the data you have safe when you are moving to the cloud. The wrong migration process could bring you a lot of troubles, unexpected spendings and business failures. Thus said, you should be careful when you are starting cloud migration.
The best way to migrate safely is to hire an MSP who already has successful cloud migration cases. Good MSP usually has ready solutions and can build a custom solution for your company quite quickly.
Conclusion: how to choose the right cloud strategy?
Actually, this is a quite hard question. As you can see, there are several common strategies and your choice will depend on the company’s specifications and goals you want to achieve. So, hiring an MSP still is the simplest way to make all the things right.