From Strategy to Tools: How to Migrate to the Cloud

The cloud has become a very popular and useful business tool for handling and safely storing a company’s data. What makes it so appealing to companies is lowered IT costs, increased flexibility, improved performance, and opens up more opportunities for development and new capabilities.

More and more companies are choosing to migrate to the cloud, ditching their physical data centers and servers for cloud-based infrastructure. These are usually offered by public cloud service providers like AWS or Microsoft Azure. And as tech continues to improve there’s an increasing number of companies switching from one cloud provider to another.

But first things first, here is how to migrate to the cloud from traditional data centers.

Cloud Migration Strategies

There are five cloud migration strategies that organizations typically use for all-inclusive IT solutions. It’s important to consider the needs of your business before choosing one.

● Rehosting, or lift and shift, mobilizes infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). It’s pretty simple, as it just redeploys the current data, software, and applications on the cloud server. This strategy is best for those who are new to the cloud and those who do not wish to modify the code.

● Refactoring is more of a lift, tinker, and shift type of strategy. It involves altering applications so that they’re optimized for the cloud, and it uses platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The optimization of applications makes them easier to use with cloud-based tools.

● Revising is a more drastic reworking of application architecture and system code that will be moved to the cloud. Businesses do this so that they can make the most of what cloud tools have to offer. There are some cloud tools that will require major code changes. This is for experienced cloud users.

● Rebuilding completely erases the existing application and system code and replaces it with a new one. This can be costly and time consuming, and it’s usually done when a company’s current tech solutions aren’t meeting the current demand.

● Replacing is a complete overhaul without the work of rebuilding. A company will move its current data into a third-party, prebuilt application that’s usually offered by the cloud provider.

Cloud Migration Process

Before starting the migration process, it helps to identify how you plan on using it. Data recovery, DevOps, and hosting workloads are just a few ways to use the cloud. Know how much of your business relies on data, assess data compliance issues, and application interoperability.

Once you’ve answered these questions, it’s time to determine the total cost of ownership (TCO) and figure out exactly what tools you need to succeed. Now that your environment and migration plan are mapped, it’s time to migrate the data. Once that’s done you move into maintaining your cloud optimisation, updates, security, real-time monitoring, and more. Your cloud service provider should be working closely with you during the migration process.

Cloud Migration Tools

There are free and paid migration tools. Whichever you choose will depend on what your needs are. Most providers offer very robust tools for free to make the migration easy and seamless.

But if you’re moving data to more than one cloud provider, a fuller-featured paid tool may likely be a better choice, like Corent SurPass or Turbonomic. Every migration tool is not supported by every cloud service provider, so be sure to make sure that your migration tool is compatible with your provider first.

Migrating to the cloud can be as simple as you make it. However, if you intend on taking full advantage of all that the cloud can do for you and your business, it may be in your best interest to step up your approach a little bit. Keep your IT team close, and migrating will be a breeze of fresh air.