Why are you moving to the cloud?

Be clear on the purpose of migration and set business goals that need to be achieved by moving to the cloud. Setting up baseline standards for your planned IT infrastructure and key performance indicators (KPIs) will make it possible to measure the extent of your cloud migration success.

What are you moving to cloud?

Analyze the interdependencies in your current environment and prioritize on what will be migrated. Examine the feasibility of migrating complex workloads and the tools needed to simplify workload deployment. Finally, align your plan with the Return on Investment (ROI) achieved through migration and timelines.

How are you moving to cloud?

Implement best practices in consultation with your cloud service provider to design, validate and migrate your applications and workloads to the cloud. Plan on modernizing your traditional legacy systems or applications based on your maturity models as recommended by your cloud consulting partner.

For maximum benefit, it is essential you go through the below steps while you plan your migration.

1. Identify and prioritize key components for migration

Begin your migration plan with a clear picture of the core infrastructure components of your legacy system. Identify the interdependencies between technology components, applications, and services. Deploy Service Mapping to discover all application services in your organization and create a comprehensive dependency diagram to map all devices, applications, and configurations in your current system. An ideal migration plan always starts with migrating the services that have the fewest dependencies followed by the services which are closest to your customers.

2. Create a well-defined migration architecture

Establishing a meticulous architectural plan is crucial to driving your migration effort. The architecture should define the refactoring effort, infrastructure requirements, and migration strategy. It should also cover production switchover mechanisms and prioritize the components to be migrated.

3. Choose the migration strategy

IT assets to be migrated will have unique needs based on performance, cost, and complexity and hence there is no one-size fits-all plan. Hence, you must analyze the current and future state of your system to choose a cloud migration strategy in line with your specific needs and capabilities. These cloud migration strategies also known as the 6 Rs of migration would help you choose the best cloud migration strategy.

4. Establish Key Metrics

Define key metrics or performance indicators that help you identify problems that may occur during the migration process. Establish metrics against different categories such as infrastructure, applications, user experience, and business engagement. Performance metrics such as disk performance, memory usage, error rates, availability, lags, response time, and engagement rates help you pinpoint and mitigate any performance issues. Determine the metrics which crucial for your business and will be most impacted by cloud migration. Well-defined metrics help you clearly measure the success of your cloud migration efforts.

5. Single cloud/Hybrid cloud or multi-cloud

Choosing the right cloud environment to migrate your solutions involves multiple factors. You can opt for a single cloud provider if you want to optimize your application for a single cloud environment. On the other hand, moving with a hybrid/multi-cloud approach helps you run some components of your application on one provider while others with another provider. Each approach has its own pros and cons, but it’s best to choose the most suitable cloud environment based on your unique business needs.

6. Optimization and Cost Control

Obviously, expenses on cloud infrastructure are vastly different from your on-premises infrastructure. However, you can achieve maximum ROI on your cloud investment through careful cost predictability, efficient balancing of spend, and resource management. Expert consultation with your service provider can help you choose the right strategy towards these goals. Optimizing and controlling the cloud cost will not be a barrier in your migration journey if your provider can bring in a comprehensive set of cloud cost management capabilities to implement FinOps processes seamlessly across cloud environments.

7. Security and Compliance

Security is a major challenge when migrating to cloud. Hence, it is essential that your infrastructure remains compliant with most of the security standards. Shift your migration plan to a trusted cloud provider who offers robust tooling and resources to help you to detect and overcome security vulnerabilities and sophisticated threats. No matter which cloud platform you migrate to, make sure that your migration service provider adheres to cloud-native security services Controls and existing compliance regulations used across the globe such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, and GDPR to name a few.