Cloud migration strategies

What is Cloud migration?

Cloud migration is a complex process and involves the process of moving applications, data and other business elements to a cloud environment. The organization should consider several factors while migrating to the cloud, from the immediate benefits to potential risks to long term advantages. A successful cloud migration should have a strategy that would address the benefits and risks involved. The factors for choosing the cloud migration approach can be anything from using the least-disruptive application compatibility, approach, risk management, performance, HA requirements and ROI. Let’s see the different cloud migration service strategies organizations use to meet their objectives.

Lift and Shift Migration

The lift and shift migration method is about migrating your data and applications without any changes. It involves lifting the data and applications from its current hosting environment and shifting to a new host i.e. the cloud. There are no significant changes to the data flow, applications and other mechanisms. This enables minimal disruption of databases, applications and authentication mechanism resulting in a swift and cost-effective migration.

Advantages of Lift & Shift Migration Approach

• Lift and shift migration approach doesn’t need any changes in the application level as it merely re hosts the applications, data on the cloud.
• Security and compliance are relatively simple in lift and shift cloud migration as you can translate the requirements that should b implemented against storage, compute and network resources.
• There won’t be any significant changes required in the business processes associated with application as the lift and shift cloud migration approach uses the same architecture constructs even after the migration to cloud.
• A lift and shift cloud approach from on-premise to the cloud increases agility. Replatforming is a variation of lift and shift approach and involves a slight modification for the purpose of taking advantage of new cloud infrastructure. You can also add several new features during replatforming to enable scaling and allow the applications to gain advantage from the reserved resources of the cloud environment Replatforming approach can be a useful step for accomplishing goals like adopting a managed service or increasing system performance.

Application Migration

Application migration involves moving an application program from one environment to another. For example. Migration from an on-premises server to a cloud environment or from one cloud environment to another.

In application migration, the application program is transformed along with the data and the operating system. There are different strategies for application migration:

1) New system implementation

2) System conversion

New system Implementation

New system implementation as the name suggests starting over. Although the data is protected and moved in this process, the applications are built from the scratch or replaced with new applications. New system implementation is a complex process and the organization needs to make sure that all the functionality is being replicated by the new system. The team should be retrained on the new suite of applications, which might function differently from the previous applications. New system implementation is also the right approach for business that want to switch to new application stack instead of being with the existing provider.

System Conversion

New system implementation as the name suggests starting over. Although the data is protected and moved in this process, the applications are built from the scratch or replaced with new applications. New system implementation is a complex process and the organization needs to make sure that all the functionality is being replicated by the new system. The team should be retrained on the new suite of applications, which might function differently from the previous applications.New system implementation is also the right approach for business that want to switch to new application stack instead of being with the existing provider.

Technical Migration

Technical Migration upgrades the database and operating systems but maintains the existing applications. Technical migration is generally implemented to utilize the cloud features such as automation, increased performance and scalability.

This cloud migration strategy helps business prepare for future application migration. This helps businesses to minimize the downtime and in turn the disruption and experience the cloud which can be used to plan their next level of transformation.

It is easy to decide the cloud migration strategy that your business wants to implement. Designing the strategy and implementing it is the biggest challenge for most businesses. The migration projects might be delayed, can have cost overruns and other issues that can affect the process. Alphavima’s migration services provides customers with reliable, cost effective and proven methods implementing the migration at a faster pace, eliminating the risks of cloud migration.