Plan for the best experience in your trip to the cloud
Cloud adoption has been hitting new records in this turbulent year. Scalability, flexibility, agility, promising business continuity, resilient operations, and faster time to market are all advantages of cloud computing that drive businesses to go for cloud technologies vigorously.
To start off your journey to the cloud from an on-premises infrastructure platform, you must evaluate the current state of your IT landscape and determine the best way to make your cloud adoption a success. When you are inventorying your infrastructure, you are always advised to leverage the 6R’s lens to assess your applications, databases and workloads, and define different approaches to migrate each component smoothly in your trip to the cloud.
6R’s Lens to Find Your Cloud Candidates
Rehost – Basic life-and-shift to redeploy application components to a new environment (physical, virtual or cloud) without modification of code and functions.
Refactor – Restructure existing code to remove technical debt and transform applications to become cloud-native for a Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model. Without changing its external behavior, refactoring enables optimization of applications and improvement in efficiency by leveraging automation.
Rearchitect – Re-engineer aged applications, which are not compatible with the new cloud environment, by materially altering or extending existing application code so it can be transformed to a new architecture and fully exploited cloud capabilities.
Rebuild – Rewrite and redesign applications from scratch with cloud-native technologies while preserving its scope and specifications.
Replace – Discard the former application components and repurchase them with different products which offer all the necessary functionality and meet new business requirements.
Retire – Get rid of applications in the IT portfolio that are redundant or no longer useful.
Three Major Migration Trends
Once the asset evaluation has been completed, you can then outline a holistic plan with priorities, resources, budget and timelines taken into consideration. There are three options of migration strategies organizations can consider based on unique business goals and needs.
Migration
This approach is also known as ‘lift-and-shift’. Some enterprises look for a quicker solution to scale its migration with minimal efforts and time to meet business objectives, release datacenter space, and achieve cost savings in capital expense. This approach causes minimal service interruptions and yields fastest results of cloud migration, however, some applications might not perform as effectively as possible and cannot take full advantages of the cloud environment without a bit of tinkering.
Optimization
This is an approach goes beyond lift-and-shift which is sometimes called ‘lift-and-optimize’. Not all applications are compatible with the PaaS model and would need tweaks to achieve better performance and outcomes in the cloud. Also, some customer-built programs are more complex and not suitable for a pure lift-and-shift strategy. An IT landscape with these kinds of applications should take advantage of modern operating systems, database platforms and cloud services to transform these applications and infrastructure into service-oriented architecture for better performance and operational cost efficiency in the cloud.
Modernization
Compared to a lift-and-shift migration, cloud modernization is a more strategic route to maximize the competitive edges that cloud technologies can bring to an organization. A plain migration of a legacy system will hide you from a wider range of associated cloud benefits like better efficiency and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) over time. Through refactoring, rearchitecting, rebuilding and replacing, modernization help tackle all the difficulties you will face when your legacy applications are needed to update and scale in the cloud. New cloud capabilities can hence be fully exploited to improve agility, efficiency and return of investment (ROI).
Conclusion
The first step in a cloud migration journey is to assess current IT landscape that helps you identify candidates for migrations, optimization or modernization, and shape a strategic migration plan. Accurate rationalization and seamless transition require in-depth knowledge and structured assessments. To ensure success in a migration project, enterprises normally rely on transcending cloud solution experts like KBQuest who are experienced enough to be your tour guide in the migration journey with strategies, service continuity, security, best practices, financial risks, etc. – all possible concerns and risks you can think of – taken into account.
Contact our cloud team to get more recommendations, best tips as well as information about our cloud services for a seamless trip to the cloud.
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