How to Plan a Successful Cloud Migration

Cloud migration is one of the greatest evolution that technologists will experience this decade, with a significant effect on a business's capacity to develop and improve its general financial aspects. Migrating to the cloud gives organizations a one of a kind chance to not just improve their adaptability, decrease costs, and focus on their core capabilities, but to completely change the way these organizations work.

Benefits of Cloud Migration

At the very least, the favorable circumstances of migrating to the cloud include:

• Buying and expending resource on a pay-as-you-go basis, in this way you can either increase or decrease them varying for ideal usage 
• Changing capital costs into operating costs 
• Empowering quick innovation without the cost and complexities of infrastructure management and hardware procurement
• Getting an ideal opportunity to advertise 

Cloud migration when done right, is continuous migration of information, framework, applications, and different business components, bringing about business transformation. However, cloud migration is certainly not a one-and-done suggestion. To succeed, it requires planning, deep analysis, and execution of an extensive hierarchical and specialized technique that meets your general business objectives. 

Working with clients, the Google Cloud Professional Services group has built up a migration factory, a technique for performing huge scope migrations to the cloud. Intended for moving enterprise applications, migration factory offers a hierarchical structure and set of procedures that cause you to make a scaled team with the correct aptitudes and comprehension of your organization, and set clear and characterized objectives that are firmly estimated through the term of the program. 

For every application that you need to move, the migration factory approach takes an end-to-end view of the project, including: 

• Building the business case for moving the particular application 
• Surveying the current application and infrastructure 
• Devising an effective migration plan 

This set of key exercises assists in forming the migration path for your applications portrays the migration execution and builds up post-migration task standards. The entirety of this makes your migration less difficult and progressively viable. 

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How GCP Migration Factory Helps

As far as we can tell, a nice and well-structured migration factory can help with a few regular difficulties: 

• Unclear Objectives: Lack of durable vision and cloud adoption strategy throughout the association; the objective can either be short-term, long-term, or both. 
• Absence Of Sponsorship: Not having the correct degree of investment of aptitudes, ability, effort, and time. 
• Inadequate Migration Planning: Starting your cloud journey without understanding the unpredictability of your current application estate. 
• Poor Technology Choice: An inability to appropriately audit the outstanding tasks at hand to be migrated and pick the correct cloud product and service model. With the correct technology choice, organizations can effectively migrate to the cloud to determine costs, competitive advantage alongside quick innovation. 
• Ineffective Delivery And Operational Model: An effective delivery and operational model is all you need to succeed in cloud migration, you need the right process, technology, and people – in all stages of the migration. 

Likewise, a migration factory model can assist businesses with inferring various advantages: 

• Velocity: With a well-developed operational model and in addition to automation, migration can turn out to be a smooth process.
• Reduced Costs: When you have experienced and productive procedures, there’s no hurdle in migration. Google Cloud users that follow a migration factory model can see altogether reduced costs. 
• Diminished Probability Of Risks: Its important to identify the risk tolerance of the outstanding tasks at hand being migrated directly reduces downtime or potentially impromptu downtime during the migration—so you can return to software dev sooner. 
• Quality: Properly defined and automated processes bring about increasingly reliable and flawless migrations. 

An establishment for bigger cloud-native initiatives: The best practices, learnings, and measures you gain as a piece of the migration procedure position your group to take on increasingly perplexing and testing cloud initiatives.

Working on the cloud has become an unquestionable requirement for modern business ventures and associations that depend intensely on legacy on-prem frameworks are trailing behind their rivals. In that capacity, it's nothing unexpected that 94% of organizations use at least one cloud-based application, while 84% of businesses use a multi-cloud methodology. 

Moving to the cloud is basic for organizations to improve workforce profitability. Be that as it may, the procedure can frequently be a monstrous endeavor. To keep away from application outages or crucial information breaches, cloud migrations require a point by point and a key execution plan that sets your business ready for enduring achievement.

Plan Your Successful Cloud Migration Strategy

Toward the finish of effective cloud migration, your company ought to have the option to work a few or the entirety of its frameworks on the cloud, without causing gigantic costs or disturbing user experience. To accomplish this objective, you need a painstakingly planned strategy that catches the different necessities from over the business. 

Migration to the cloud can seriously affect legacy data, basic application information, and application performance—making them significant considerations in a migration. Keeping these considerations in mind all through the planning stages will enable your business to organize applications and frameworks to migrate while staying compliant to guidelines and policies.

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Key Cloud Migration Contemplations 

Applications don’t need any installations and let you access from anyplace—yet this can likewise present security dangers and vulnerabilities. To relieve these worries, organizations need a cloud migration strategy that organizes top tier security, while staying good with both existing infrastructure and new cloud environments. As you work out your plan, these are a portion of the things that you should consider. 

• Assess And Foresee The Dangers 

While there are numerous advantages to moving to the cloud, organizations might be deflected by the apparent security dangers. For example, 65% of data security specialists need to store information in the cloud, however, 47% of IT chiefs think their on-prem resources are progressively secure. That is because a cloud migration can bargain information security as it requires third-party services to secure basic information. It's thusly indispensable to assess the security risks that go with this change. 

• Embrace A Hybrid Methodology 

Given these possible dangers, it's shrewd to dunk a toe into the cloud as opposed to hopping in with the two feet. With a hybrid methodology that mixes both cloud-based together with on-prem applications, organizations can try out specific frameworks without completely upsetting their IT foundation. This empowers them to recognize any likely issues and holes in prerequisites and fine-tune them before taking the cloud migration across the company. 

• Existing Architecture Versus Cloud Architecture 

IT architecture has been depicted as Lego sets. Although the building blocks are basically the equivalent, there are numerous minor variations from how the building blocks can be assembled. In this way, before moving any components of your IT framework to the cloud, you need to set up which have a perfect architecture and which may require adjustment to make them reasonable for moving to the cloud. It's a best practice to make this a stride further and guarantee that apps are ready, yet also, streamlined for their new environment. 

• On-Prem Security Versus Cloud Security 

Despite where information is stored and processed, data breaches can happen because of human mistakes, poor security practices, and application vulnerabilities. When the data is stored and kept away on the cloud, extra dangers exist because of issues, for example, access management and inadequate credential. Before moving to the cloud, sufficient mechanisms should be set up to ensure information both at rest and in transit. 

• Tending To Skills Shortages 

Another consideration you may need to contemplate is discovering individuals with the correct ranges of abilities to execute a cloud migration plan effectively—or retraining the ability you as of now have set up. This challenge to cloud migration may cost you cash, and also additional time. It is an issue numerous organizations previously migrated to the cloud are encountering because the demand for cloud skills is more noteworthy than the supply. 

• Hire A Data Architect

A huge piece of a fruitful cloud migration comes down to having buy-in over the association—from representatives to executives. In any case, it's additionally indispensable to have a cloud architect lead that directs the whole cloud migration methodology and procedure—from requirement gathering to implementation.

• Make Sure To Test The Applications Before Rollout

One of the most important steps in cloud migration is testing. It is vital to test a new cloud environment. Organizations need to test cloud applications over different devices and check for any likely dangers and loopholes in their systems. 

• Stay Under Your Budget

While working on the cloud can spare costs over the long haul, the underlying migration can be costly. It's critical to factor in costs for data storage and preparing power reqs, just as checking, testing, and security services. Also, there are other hidden costs, for example, coordinating cloud apps and training groups to utilize cloud technologies. As you run your cloud migration strategy procedure, ensure you represent these expected consumptions in your budget. 

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How To Plan A Successful Cloud Migration?

Have you at long last settled on the choice to move your business activities and applications to the cloud? Provided that this is true, then you are going to set out on a significant technology move for your endeavor. Embracing a cloud computing service encourages businesses to address their business needs with proficiency and speed.

Be that as it may, the transition from legacy to cloud-native application environments is an extremely intricate procedure, regularly loaded with different challenges. Whether you are wanting to shut down a data warehouse and migrate to the cloud or integrate complex solutions, for example, hybrid or even multi-cloud architecture, it is basic to have a well-characterized technique. Further in this blog, we will look at the key components of an effective cloud transition. 

1. Locate The Ideal Partner 

This might not seem something as important but trust us it is. It is very much important to choose a cloud service provider that can perfectly match your business, financial, operational, compliance, and security requirements. With so many CSPs available, definitely it is an extreme task to choose the best one. Notwithstanding the large providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, the cloud service circle is additionally packed with small scale providers offering more or less similar services. Try to finish your prep soon as it precisely enables you to evaluate possible cloud partners. Every business organization has a remarkable set of business characteristics, operational requirements, and financial constraints. However, during service assessment, you need to take care of a few key contemplations. Analyze their business model and procedures, security processes, organization support, and technical abilities. Spend a considerable amount of time and effort into breaking down the important features of a CSP. 

2. Decide The Deployment Model 

To guarantee a successful and smooth migration to cloud computing, businesses need to understand and investigate their necessities heretofore and concoct a general cloud strategy. To use the cloud adequately, a solid knowledge of the cloud deployment models is necessary. There are 4 cloud deployment models from which the organizations have to choose: public, private, hybrid, and community. Let’s have a look at each:

1. Public Cloud: The name says it all, this cloud deployment model is available for anyone to purchase to and use it according to their needs. High organization speed, ease, and flexible scaling choices are just a few of the prominent advantages of choosing a public cloud model. SMEs or Agile organizations that need on-demand scaling may select the public cloud model as it would ensure reduced costs and unwavering maintenance support. The perils of information security and compliance are significant drawbacks of the public cloud model. 
2. Private Cloud: As the name infers, this cloud model is generally used by a single organization only. Private cloud suits best for both on-premise and off-premise environments and it can either be possessed by the organization itself or a third-party. Notwithstanding versatility and adaptability, private cloud systems make sure to provide robust security and uncompromised quality. Be that as it may, getting and maintaining private cloud solutions can cost high. Business organizations with exceptionally sensitive or crucial data or with rigid commitments may settle on the private cloud model. 
3. Hybrid Cloud: A hybrid cloud is an environment that consolidates distinctive cloud service models, most generally private and public clouds. Such kind of model would allow business organizations to reap the rewards of two deployment models without a moment's delay. For instance, businesses can decide to migrate their applications to a private cloud to ensure maximum security, while making full use of the computational resources of a managed public cloud. The hybrid cloud technique solves more issues for organizations as it gives a more significant amount of flexibility and adaptability by shifting workloads between cloud solutions as requirements and costs change. 
4. Community Cloud: This organization model can be said to match the public cloud model, with a couple of interesting differences. Organizations operating under a similar space and sharing regular interests and prerequisites may go for a community cloud infrastructure. A community cloud environment shares its computing resources among different associations and can work both off-premises and on-premises. Companies in joint ventures, educational institutes, and research firms generally go for the community cloud model.

Notwithstanding the deployment models that store and process your data, there are three essential models of cloud services utilized for a different kind of computing - Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Each cloud service model possesses its pros and cons.

1. Software as a Service: Generally organizations use SaaS more than the other two models because this cloud service model is pretty easy to manage and use. Giving the clients access to a cloud-based software through the web or an API, the SaaS model is available for anyone to buy on a subscription basis. The most amazing advantage of SaaS is the instant accessibility of resources at an insignificant cost. Examples of SaaS are JIRA, GoToMeeting, Salesforce, BigCommerce, Dropbox, and MailChimp.
2. Platform as a Service: PaaS is a cloud service model whose aim is to deliver a structure for developers with the goal that they can manufacture custom applications online. Storage, server, management, and systems administration resources for creating, tweaking, testing, and hosting the applications would be provided by the CSP. Choosing the PaaS model enables organizations to focus on the business side of application development, without stressing over the underlying hardware resources or costs. Examples of PaaS are AWS Elastic Beanstalk, MS Azure, Google App Engine, Apache Stratos, Red Hat's OpenShift, Heroku, and OpenShift.
3. Infrastructure as a Service: IaaS is the most adaptable cloud service model that offers clients with the most power and noteworthy degree of control over hardware and software resources. The clients get access to the systems, servers, operating systems, and storage of the cloud foundation through an API or a dashboard. IaaS approach permits organizations to scale their remaining tasks at hand as they push ahead on the pay-as-you-go model. Examples of IaaS are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Digital Ocean, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, Google Compute Engine (GCE). 

It is basic to have a strong and solid comprehension of the significant level contrasts between various cloud environments and services models with the goal that it motivates you to pick the best one for your association.

3. Focus On Security

One of the main concerns for the majority of stakeholders while moving business information and applications to the cloud is security. It is important to give more consideration to the security arrangements and principles of the CSP. If your business works in a vigorously regulated industry, for example, e-commerce, health care sector, or legal business that requests secrecy of client data, then you need to make it a point to assess the service agreement of your cloud service provider. PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) are two significant instances of such regulations. How does the CSP address your security concerns? Is there a guarantee for authorization and authentication? Ensure that you examine all the security and compliance requirements with your CSP in detail, before moving ahead

4. Construct Strong Management Models

Involve the internal team and management team together in the cloud migration strategy to ensure transparency across the organization. Moving business information and resources to a cloud infrastructure is a project with high risks attached and that is the reason it is critical to have the total support of the developers and executives from the beginning. Conducting training sessions can prove to be advantageous for both business pioneers and the team. Everybody in the association should be in a state of harmony with this transition and keeping the individuals firmly included causes in increasing the value of your organization. The approach to engage the leadership through the procurement procedure helps in maintaining a strategic distance from dangers and superfluous costs. When the internal project management team and stakeholders coexist together in a certain project, they can give you different perspectives (technical and non-technical both) and with the right suitable solutions.

5. Devise A Top-Level Migration Strategy

Cloud infrastructure furnishes business associations with a hearty and effective platform for global development. What's more, that is the reason it is basic to make a high-level cloud technique to meet the current and future prerequisites of your business. This is just conceivable when the internal project management team and stakeholders work adequately. You have to plan for integration plans and buy-ins to guarantee technology extensibility. A cloud computing infrastructure will offer the adaptability and versatility it needs to adapt to future development and market changes as the organization keeps on developing and scale with the time.

To Sum Up

And with this, we have reached the end of our extensive blog. If you are deciding to migrate to the cloud, then we recommend you to familiarize yourself with subjects like Agile in the cloud, twelve-factor applications, modern cloud concepts, DevOps tools and techniques, and best practices for developing and running cloud services and applications. And remember to upgrade your client experience once you're completely relocated to the cloud.

If you’re new in this field, why not acquire a cloud computing certification and get yourself going?

Good luck!