Cloud Migration: Are you ready to explore and evolve?
Aashiya Mittal
Technical Content Writer @ OnGraph Technologies Limited | BA in Web Content Creation
Cloud computing has been in the market for over a decade and has changed how small to large enterprises work. Most companies have already shifted to the cloud leveraging all its resources and services at an affordable rate.
But have you migrated to the cloud yet??
If not, then what is stopping you. It is high time to look for your perfect cloud partner and migrate immediately.
As per the survey, it is claimed that the market for cloud migration services was valued at around USD 119.13 billion in 2020. It is expected to reach around USD 448.34 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 28.89%.?
You will not believe that it has become a significant part of every business strategy to reduce IT costs. There is no doubt about the fame gained by cloud migration and how speedily it is taking over the global market.?
If you are still struggling to understand cloud migration, how to choose your cloud partner, the benefits of migrating, migration planning, strategies, and challenges, then my friend, you have landed on the right page.
We have curated a unique guide for people who are new to the basics of cloud migration. This guide will help you to answer your migration-related questions.?
But..what does the term “cloud†mean exactly?
You might have heard people talking about what it is cloud, where it is, are we in the cloud, etc. These are very standard questions if you are new to this technology. So, before we jump to cloud migration, you must understand what cloud is.
Simply put, the cloud refers to cloud computing providing a pool of resources and different services over the internet. Some use cloud and the internet interchangeably, but both are different terms.
The cloud allows people to access its resources without any specific setup. It is just servers storing all required data, softwares, hardwares, etc., and making it available to the people opting for it.?
Many organizations offer cloud services to other companies and help them move to the cloud for better business operations.?
But, before any company migrates to the cloud and starts working. They must understand their business requirement of the cloud and what services they want to opt for from their cloud service providers.?
Having this understanding will help you choose your choice of cloud and services. So let’s look at different types of clouds and their services for better clarity.
Types of Cloud computing: a brief introduction
With cloud computing, you will get on-demand access to different types of computing services and resources via the internet, which majorly includes different applications, services, servers, etc. such services are all hosted on a remote data center managed and maintained by the cloud service providers.
Cloud computing offers different clouds suitable for different business working models. We will highlight the primary offerings of different clouds, so you can understand which cloud is suitable for your business.
Public cloud?
All the hosted services, applications, and platforms are available to the public over the internet. The cloud service providers offer all the services mentioned for free or might be sold per the subscription or pay-per-usage pricing models.
The public cloud service providers are responsible for managing and maintaining all the data centers, hardware, and infrastructure to keep the customer’s workload running efficiently.?
The global market for public cloud computing will grow further by 2022 due to its ease of adjusting to meet changing workload demands.?
Then, why need other cloud options if it is perfect? Let s see why.
Public cloud users can face issues and challenges in keeping their applications and websites running with great speed. Because all the resources are shared, if one customer exhausts the resources, there is nothing left for other customers within the same network.?
It might lead to significant speed and performance issues. Thus, it leads most businesses to opt for private clouds.
Private cloud
Private clouds have overcome the drawback of shared resources and services. It made the services dedicated to the customers who opt for it.?
The cloud service providers divide the virtual environment into several environments and allocate each to different customers with dedicated resources.?
Unlike the public cloud, the private cloud can be easily hosted either on-premises or on an independent cloud provider’s infrastructure.
Many organizations prefer the private cloud over the public cloud as it is secure and efficient in meeting regulatory compliance requirements and handling sensitive data.
What if an organization wants to leverage the best of both worlds (public and private clouds)??
Then you must go for hybrid cloud options.
Hybrid cloud
Here come the hybrid cloud models to cater to the combined benefits of private and public cloud environments.?
A hybrid cloud connects a company’s private and public cloud services into a single, scalable infrastructure that helps them run complex workloads better.
Hybrid clouds are capable of perfect orchestration between both types of clouds. Also, you can quickly move your workloads freely between the two clouds per the changing business needs.?
Have you heard of hybrid multi-cloud? But, what if a business needs different services from different cloud providers? Let’s explore.
Multicloud and hybrid multi-cloud
Multi-cloud means using more than one cloud from two or more cloud providers. For example, a company wants to avail an email SaaS from one vendor and an image processing SaaS from another.?
With this cloud model, you can simply avail multiple cloud services from two or more leading public cloud providers, such as SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.?
If you are wondering what are SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services. We will discuss them in the next section.
This multi-cloud model has gained popularity as it prevents the vendor lock-in situation. This model helps you to avail your choice of service from a suitable provider offering services at an affordable rate, and you do not have to stick to one provider for all the services.?
But working with multiple clouds can be challenging as they offer different management tools, data transmission rates, and security protocols, resulting in complex management.?
Here it comes! Cloud computing services?
Clouds offer different services, but how can one categorize those services. There are three significant categories of cloud computing services- IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service).?
Most companies use all three services from their cloud service provider. Let's see how they differ and what services fall under which category.?
SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)
The cloud service providers host softwares that the companies can use directly. With such services, companies can simply start using it without physically installing and configuring each device connected to the internet.?
You can access those softwares from any location, desktop, or mobile device with a single tap. All you need is a good internet connection. The best part is that you do not have to manage and maintain the softwares, which means you do not have to update or upgrade the softwares. The service provider will do everything.?
As per the research, the Indian Saas market will tend to grow exponentially by grow 20 times to $50-70 billion by 2030.
Not only this, you can see how investment has risen unexpectedly in the Indian market.
PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)
The cloud service providers will offer an on-demand platform, including all types of hardware, complete software stack, infrastructure, and even development tools, making it easier for companies to run, develop, and manage applications.
The companies can do all of these without investing directly, handling the complexity and inflexibility of managing every type of platform on-premises. You can go for your choice of servers, networks, storage, database, operating system software, and middleware hosted with the cloud.?
As per the survey, PaaS global market will show tremendous growth by 2026.?
PaaS has also made it easier for container technology, enabling developers to build portable applications without being dependent on the underlying infrastructure.?
IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service)
This service lets you avail of on-demand access to the most basic computing resources via the internet, including physical and virtual servers, networking, and storage.?
领英推è
IaaS enables the companies to scale up and down the selected resources depending on their business requirement.? It helps to eliminate the unnecessary requirement of having on-premises or ‘owned’ infrastructure.?
Post pandemic, the global market has shown significant growth in the IaaS cloud computing services.
Why should you migrate to the cloud?
Despite many benefits, most companies are still figuring out if they should migrate to the cloud or not. If you are still having second thoughts, then you must see the below survey graph, explaining the rate at which the Enterprise IT Spending in Key Market Segments Will Shift to the Cloud by 2025.
Well, we have summed up some benefits that will help your business grow if you opt to migrate to the cloud.?
Elasticity and scalability?
As every business tends to grow thus requires more resources and sometimes fewer resources per the workload. With the cloud, you will get this freedom of instantaneously adding or taking away resources on a demand basis. Elasticity allows quickly expanding or decreasing CPU, memory, and storage resources to meet frequently changing business demands without worrying about cloud capacity planning.?
Cost-saving?
Cloud technology is popular due to its cost-effective plans. It only requires you to pay for the services and resources you will use. Not only this, you can go for customized plans.
So if you start with proper planning, you can save many investment costs.
Agility and flexibility?
In the cloud, agility is quickly developing, testing, and launching business applications. Not only this, you will be able to respond quickly to the changing business needs.?
This has improved the flexibility, allowing the users to work and connect to the cloud from any location.?
Security?
If we talk about migrating to the cloud, all your data will also migrate to the cloud, increasing the attack surface. But with the cloud, you will get additional security layers, protecting your data from thefts and hackers.?
It means all your sensitive data is safe with your cloud providers.
Is migrating to the cloud easy?
With proper planning and understanding of all your business requirements, migration can be more accessible. Your chosen cloud service provider will do the technical tasks for you.
Thus, you must conduct more profound research while choosing your cloud partner. Without proper planning, you might get the expected outcomes.?
Before you start the migration, you must ask yourself some questions that will help you with your migration.
- Where are you moving to?
- Why do you want to move it?
- How will you move it?
Cloud migration process?
This calls for making a cloud migration checklist to avoid any mistakes. You better keep tabs on what has been done so far and what is remaining so you do not miss any data behind. Otherwise, you have to face the consequences.
So, make sure to work on the following process.
- Understand the “why.â€
Make sure you are clear about the purpose of moving to the cloud. The markers and leadership must be clear with all the facts and figures.?
- Understanding what to move and how
Understand the nature of the clod where you are going to migrate. Understand which application will work, their dependencies, what tools you will require, and others for efficient migration.
- Migrate applications and data
Now, you can start the migration, but make sure that you should not start with complex tasks. After you migrate, test the working of your applications and look for any issues that can impact its working.
6 Rs of Cloud Migration (strategies)?
Now that you have the perfect process in action. It's time to decide what strategy you will follow to achieve your migration goal.?
The cloud comes with the famous 6R strategies that fit any business requirement. But, keep this in mind. These are not the only way to achieve successful migration. We will explain each of them so that you can choose your strategy.
Rehosting?
Also known as lift-and-shift with not much migration efforts. It mostly opts for its speed, as you do not have to indulge in architectural refactoring. You only need to opt for the virtual machine and the application to a cloud provider.?
Also, you can implement this strategy with automation or workload mobility tools.
But, this approach will not let you explore the true potential of the cloud as the applications are not built in a cloud-native fashion.?
Replatforming?
It leads to cloud optimization as it adopts the cloud platform while keeping the core architecture of the application as it is. To go for this strategy, you need more profound insights into the application or virtual machines you will migrate.?
Replatforming your applications will have more horizontal scaling and portability. It works well when replacing the database backends of applications with an alternate PaaS database solution of a cloud provider.
You can use it if you want to leverage good performance without investing more and re-architecting the application. But, you might fall into the trap of vendor lock-in.
Rearchitecting?
Suitable for critical applications that need to be modernized due to its poor performance issues. Re-architecting incurs high transformation costs but is worth investing in if you want your application to be future-ready.
This approach requires you to work on creating a new application architecture by breaking it down into smaller building blocks and microservices and enclosing them into (Docker) containers for deployment on a container platform.
Re-architecting an application also includes breaking down the supported business processes that improve simplicity and make the entire process more agile.
Retire?
Simply means that an application is explicitly phased out. It means that the existing application can no longer solve the business needs.
Then it makes sense to discontinue the existing application and create a new one with a more customer base.
Retain?
Retain means that you cannot just simply start the application migration at this point due to some lack of information. Some applications are not meant to work efficiently on the cloud due to a lack of backward compatibility or other technical issues.
Some applications may lack latency requirements, compliance reasons, etc., so there is no sense in investing in migrating that outdated application to the cloud. So better considering to revisit the application.?
Repurchasing
Repurchasing simply means replacing the existing application with an alternate SaaS solution offering similar features.
The effort into this migration approach depends on the requirements and available data. If you consider the same vendor for this SaaS replacement will offer an option to migrate data with little effort quickly.?
Challenges of a Cloud Migration
Migrating to the cloud from the existing traditional systems can be challenging and comes with many potential technical issues. Before starting the migration, you must be aware of potential challenges you might face during the entire process.
We have listed some of the potential challenges that you must consider.
- Migration to the cloud can be costly, as the cost does not only include the migration itself. You must consider other factors, such as increased bandwidth, network facilities, storage, etc.
- Migrating to the cloud is a complex task. Thus you must have skilled IT support and professionals to handle the task.
- Applications with high dependencies can be challenging and can bring the entire process to a halt. So you must understand the working models of each application and test them before you migrate.
- Some legacy applications are not meant to run on the cloud. Either you think of an alternate application, or you need to create a new one without impacting your company’s reputation.
Conclusion?
The time is not so far when every company is using cloud-based resources and services. Any business can migrate to the cloud with the right tools and technologies. This dependency on the cloud has made life easier for every working professional in any industry.
Any business can migrate multiple times to the cloud and even switch from one cloud to another per their changing business requirements. But for that, you must understand what cloud options are suitable for your business, what services you want to opt for, and the form of the cloud service provider.
Migrating to the cloud comes with several benefits you cannot assume at the beginning of the migration. Still, when you can scale up the resources with your growing business, no one is happier than the leaders who thought of migrating.
So, keep exploring and welcome the cloud with open hands.
Wow, your focus on the necessity of cloud migration is majorly on point! Digging deeper into cloud security measures could really level up your expertise. Have you thought about how cloud computing might shape your future career goals?
tech solution ltd
1 å¹´Cloud migration services help businesses move their IT infrastructure, applications, and data from on-premises to cloud-based platforms. They offer assessment, planning, migration, security, testing, deployment, training, and cost optimization. Consultants ensure a smooth transition, compliance, and maximize cloud benefits for organizations. https://www.nucleustechnologies.com/services/cloud-migration/