- Organisations can choose cloud migration strategies such as rehosting, relocation and refactoring depending on their specific objectives.
- Migrating to the cloud involves addressing technical complexities and scalability issues, including the logistics of transferring large volumes of data.
- Successful cloud migration requires not only technical skills, but also a cultural shift within the organisation to embrace new cloud technologies.
Cloud migration involves moving digital assets such as data, applications and IT resources from on-premises infrastructure to cloud environments. This strategic shift allows organisations to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of cloud computing, such as improved scalability, flexibility and cost efficiency.
By adopting a systematic migration approach, organisations can prioritise workloads, minimise disruption and maximise the benefits of cloud technologies. However, the migration process also presents technical complexities, scalability challenges, and requires a shift in organisational skills and culture to adapt to new technology platforms.
What is cloud migration
Cloud migration is the process of moving digital assets such as data, applications and IT resources to the cloud. Traditionally, organisations have run their applications and IT services on self-managed IT infrastructure maintained in an on-premises data centre.
Some organisations may have thousands of databases, applications and system software running on-premises. When you migrate to the cloud, you move these workloads from on-premises data centres to the cloud provider’s infrastructure in a planned, non-disruptive way. With a cloud migration strategy, you can prioritise workloads, plan and test to systematically move your operations to the cloud.
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What types of cloud migration are there
There are many common cloud migration strategies that organisations use to successfully adopt the cloud. Your organisation’s decision will likely depend on factors such as business needs, technical challenges and the desired outcome of the migration.
Rehosting: Rehosting involves moving the components of an application to the cloud with little or no modification. Essentially, you take what you have in your current environment and lift and move it to the cloud infrastructure. This is often the fastest way to migrate because it doesn’t require any changes to the application’s architecture.
However, not all legacy application designs take advantage of all that the cloud environment has to offer. So this cloud migration strategy may not always be the best approach to maximising the benefits of the cloud.
Relocate: Relocating is often referred to as lift and optimise. In this approach, you move applications to the cloud without making significant changes. However, once they’re in the cloud, you may want to move them to cloud-centric services.
For example, after moving a database to the cloud, you might migrate it from a hosted virtual machine (VM) to a managed database service. This provides some of the benefits of cloud-centric capabilities without extensive initial refactoring.
Refactoring: Refactoring is the process of redesigning applications to take full advantage of cloud-centric features. For example, you can break down monolithic architectures into microservices or replace existing modules with fully managed cloud services. Organisations often choose this approach when they need to add functionality, scale or increase performance that would be difficult to achieve in the application’s existing environment.
Also read: Understanding cloud backup: How it functions and why it’s essential
What are the challenges of cloud migration
Technical complexity: Technical complexities in your existing systems need to be identified and properly managed. For example, some applications may be interdependent and moving one without the others could disrupt operations. Legacy systems may not be compatible with cloud environments and may require significant refactoring or even complete redevelopment.
Scalability challenges: Moving a large number of applications to the cloud requires incremental effort and planning. For example, transferring large volumes of data to the cloud can be time-consuming with limited bandwidth. If problems arise after migration, rolling back to the previous state can be complex and time-consuming. Some interdependent migrations may require applications to be temporarily offline, which can impact business operations.
Skills gap: Cloud platforms may be unfamiliar to in-house teams used to traditional IT environments. And employees may be reluctant to embrace the cloud. Organisations need to train existing staff or hire new talent with the necessary cloud skills. But more than that, your internal culture often needs to change to get teams to adopt and use new cloud migration tools and processes effectively.
