Cloud Migration

What is Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration is the process with which a business or organization relocates some or all of their data center’s capabilities from a traditional on-premises environment into cloud-based infrastructure.

How can businesses prepare for cloud migration?

Cloud migration refers to transferring an organization's IT infrastructure, applications, and information assets from traditional legacy or on-premises systems to a cloud infrastructure. This process requires careful analysis and execution of the below steps.

  • Assessing current infrastructure and applications: Conduct a deep analysis of all the existing inventory and resources, such as hardware, software, and applications, to identify the migration needs and their compatibility.
  • Identifying goals and objectives for cloud migration: Specify the goals and objectives of the migration, for example, saving cost, enhancing performance, and minimizing operational costs.
  • Analyzing security and compliance requirements: Determine the security and compliance standards to ensure that the cloud setup fulfills the requirements.
  • Estimating costs and return on investment (ROI): Evaluate the economic aspects of the migration, which include assessing the upfront and maintenance costs, calculating ROI, and validating the amount you are investing.
  • Creating a migration strategy and roadmap: Create an elaborate plan that contains the migration sequence, timelines, and resource requirements.

By adhering to these steps, businesses can plan and prepare for moving to the cloud, minimize risks and ensure a successful migration to the cloud environment.

Why enterprises migrate to the cloud?

  • Unlock data analytics:

Enterprises move to the cloud to maximize data analytics. Companies store massive volumes of data on cloud services, which are scalable and affordable. Cloud-based analytics tools and services help firms handle and analyze data for improved decision-making, operational efficiency, and business intelligence.

  • Increase agility:

Cloud migration increases business agility. Cloud infrastructures allow businesses to scale computing resources based on demand. This adaptability allows faster application development and deployment, market adaptation, and technology experimentation without on-premises infrastructure.

  • Consolidate and modernize data:

Cloud migration lets companies upgrade and consolidate their data infrastructure. By centralizing data storage and administration in the cloud, enterprises can reduce silos, redundancies, and simplify their data ecosystem. This unification simplifies data access, collaboration, and current data-driven efforts.

Benefits of cloud migration

  • Lower IT operations costs:

Cloud migration provides the benefit of cost savings in IT operations. Organizations can eliminate the need for on-premises equipment, such as servers and storage, by switching to a more affordable pay-as-you-go model. This leads to cheaper maintenance expenses, fewer capital expenditures, and improved overall budget management, which enables companies to spend resources more effectively.

  • More efficient hardware allocation:

With virtualization and resource pooling, cloud migration makes hardware allocation more effective. Organizations can ensure that servers and storage are distributed dynamically in response to demand by optimizing computing resources. Because of its flexibility, an IT infrastructure can be made cost-effective and flexible while also reducing overprovisioning and improving overall resource usage.

  • Faster software innovation:

Cloud infrastructures provide an ideal setting for rapid software innovation. The development lifecycle can be streamlined by development teams by utilizing cloud-native tools and services. The cloud's quick application deployment, testing, and iteration capabilities promote a continuous innovation culture. Businesses can react swiftly to shifts in the market, client feedback, and developing technology because of their agility.

  • Elastic scalability:

Elastic scalability provided by cloud migration enables businesses to adjust resource levels in response to demand. Because of this flexibility, companies can manage a range of workloads without making large upfront infrastructure expenditures. Elastic scalability offers a flexible and economical solution regardless of peak consumption or periods of low activity.

  • Strengthened security:

Cloud providers make significant investments in security measures, frequently going above and beyond what individual businesses can do. Cloud migration can improve overall security by utilizing cloud services' enhanced encryption, identity management, and compliance features. Sensitive data is safeguarded by this collaborative security paradigm, and businesses can gain from the experience of specialized cloud security teams.

 

What is the cloud migration process?

1. Preparing for cloud migration: Cloud Migration refers to transferring an organization's IT infrastructure, applications, and information assets from traditional legacy or on-premises systems to a cloud infrastructure. This process requires careful analysis and execution of the below steps.

  • Holistic cloud migration readiness assessment: Infrastructure and application evaluation goes beyond inventory analysis. In particular, careful application discovery reveals hidden dependencies and complex app interactions. This technique uncovers issues like test-state apps integrated with production systems, requiring rigorous uncoupling. The examination covers hardware, software, and applications to ensure cloud transfer compatibility. This extensive assessment offers the groundwork for a more sophisticated migration approach that addresses cloud transition issues.
  • Identifying goals and objectives for cloud migration: Specify the goals and objectives of the migration into cloud, for example, saving cost, enhancing performance, and minimizing operational costs.
  • Analyzing security and compliance requirements: Determine the security and compliance standards to ensure that the cloud setup fulfills the requirements.
  • Estimating costs and return on investment (ROI): Evaluate the economic aspects of the migration, which include assessing the upfront and maintenance costs, calculating ROI, and validating the amount you are investing.
  • Creating a migration strategy and roadmap: Create an elaborate plan that contains the migration sequence, timelines, and resource requirements.

By adhering to these steps, businesses can plan and prepare for cloud migration, minimize risks and ensure a successful migration to the cloud environment.

2. Migration planning and execution: The migration planning and execution involves the following activities to ensure a smooth transition:

  • Application assessment and prioritization: Assist the current applications and distinguish them depending on factors such as their criticality, complexity, integration, customization, dependencies, and business value. Doing this helps focus on the migration steps and find potential loopholes.
  • Data migration strategies: The next step involves identifying the right data migration in cloud approach, for example, data replication and phased migration. Also, you need to plan for migrating and synchronizing data to ensure its integrity. Focusing on two critical parameters - data volume and sensitivity- is essential. Find out the magnitude of the data that needs to be migrated depending on transfer speed, bandwidth, and downtime factors. Also, identify confidential data which must be explicitly handled to ensure compliance with regulations and standards.
  • Managing dependencies and interdependencies: Recognize and control the dependencies between databases, infrastructure elements, applications, and external systems. Also, it is important to map the relationships between different parts to prevent bottlenecks. Ensure the migration process follows the SLAs for response times and system availability.
  • Testing and validating migrated applications: Carry out aggressive testing (both functional and performance) to verify the migrated cloud environment's efficient functioning, performance, and compatibility.
  • Deployment and roll-over planning: Plan and schedule the migration of applications to production. Working with stakeholders reduces downtime and disruptions. A well-defined rollback mechanism and a contingency plan are needed to address any problems quickly and effectively. This preemptive strategy reduces risks and ensures a seamless relocation.
  • Change management and user training: This includes offering training and support to the stakeholders and users to ensure a streamlined adoption of the newly migrated applications.

3. Ensuring security and compliance: This step involves incorporating strong security techniques to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of data while fulfilling compliance standards.

  • Assessing security risks in the cloud: This includes conducting an extensive analysis of all the security threats, such as potential vulnerabilities and risk of data exposure. Businesses need to safeguard the cloud environment from network-based attacks and unauthorized login attempts. Implementing intrusion detection and prevention systems proves helpful.
  • Implementing appropriate security measures: Implementing intrusion detection and prevention systems works effectively to mitigate risks. Businesses can use firewalls, network segmentation, and deploy incident response processes to track and respond to conflicts timely.
  • Addressing compliance requirements: Address the legal obligations to ensure the cloud migration complies with the industry-specific compliance standards.
  • Monitoring and managing security in the cloud: Monitor and manage the processes regularly to identify security loopholes. Other vital functions include SIEM (Security information and event management) and incident responses to track vulnerabilities and determine the efficiency of security processes.

4. Optimizing performance and cost efficiency: To maximize the benefits of cloud migration, businesses need to focus on and execute strategies to optimize cost and increase performance.

  • Scaling resources in the cloud: This helps you adjust resources depending on their demand. For example, you can provision or de-provision resources depending on the workload pattern or specified thresholds. It is also possible to add resource instances horizontally and vertically to cope with increasing workload needs.
  • Monitoring and optimizing performance: Use tools to track the performance, find potential loopholes and methods to optimize them, enhancing code database queries to achieve high performance.
  • Cost optimization strategies and best practices: Right-sizing resources helps prevent overuse or underuse of the available resources and optimizes cost.
  • Implementing governance and cost management tools: Using the governance and costs management tools gives a unified view, control, and transparency over the resources and costs. For example, tagging and categorization specify costs for peculiar resources or projects.

5. Managing post-migration activities: With the help of ongoing post-migration activities, businesses can ensure optimal performance and resilience of cloud environments.

  • Monitoring and troubleshooting: This includes measuring response time and latency, identifying errors and exceptions, and monitoring resource utilization to ensure the good health of the migrated assets.
  • Continuous improvement and optimization: It is essential to imbibe a practice of continuous improvement to boost the performance of the migrated applications and data.
  • Disaster recovery and backup strategies involve RTO (Recovery Time Objective), Recovery Point Objective (RPO), backup success rate, and regular testing and validation.
  • Managing vendor relationships and service level agreements: Strengthen the relationships between cloud vendors, and manage SLAs, to ensure compliance with the mutually agreed service levels.

7Rs cloud migration strategies

  • Refactoring/Re-architect: Refactoring is when your cloud-based applications are optimized for better performance in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) model. The applications themselves remain essentially unchanged outside of optimization that makes better use of the available cloud-based tools, security, or enterprise standards. Rearchitecting involves a more complete coding overhaul of the applications, though the terms are used somewhat interchangeably.
  • Replatforming (lift and reshape): Similarly, replatforming or rebuilding involves a shift to a more cloud-compliant operating system. This can involve some level of staff retraining, as applications can perform differently once migrated.
  • Repurchase (Drop and shop): Repurchase is replacing outdated apps with new ones that are cloud-based. With this approach, companies opt for customized cloud-native apps to meet their requirements. It's a simple and efficient method that gives you instant access to cloud benefits without requiring major changes or designing systems from scratch.
  • Rehost (lift and shift): The type of cloud migration people think of most often is commonly referred to by IT professionals as rehosting (or, more colloquially, “lift and shift”). Lift and shift generally goes unnoticed by employees; it involves little more than moving the applications and data from a physical location to the cloud, where it can be served by multiple locations.
  • Relocate (hypervisor-level lift and shift): The last type of cloud migration is relocating from one cloud server to another. This is another type of rehosting where, for a variety of reasons, an organization needs to shift to a different provider. For example, cloud relocation could be due to cost, increased need for capability, or quality of service. 
  • Retain (Revisit): Retaining refers to maintaining current programs while reviewing and refining them for the cloud. This method, frequently linked to rehosting, guarantees a more seamless transfer while preserving user familiarity. Re-examining programs means minimizing interference while using cloud capabilities, improving performance, and fixing compatibility problems.
  • Retire: Retire refers to the process of gradually discontinuing or retiring certain apps during a cloud migration. This method entails locating and eliminating unused or outdated apps that could no longer be useful in a cloud setting. Applications that are retired simplify processes, cut expenses, and improve overall effectiveness by removing superfluous components from the IT environment.

 

Challenges of cloud migration

  • Incompatible cloud infrastructure:

Incompatible cloud infrastructure complicates cloud migration. Migration of apps and data to an incompatible cloud environment might cause integration challenges, affecting service continuity.

  • Migrating dependent apps:

Applications that depend on each other complicate migration. Careful planning and execution are needed to preserve system integrity during interconnected application transitions.

  • Application refactoring costs:

Refactoring apps for cloud-native requirements can be costly. Optimizing code for the cloud can demand substantial resources, affecting migration time and money.

  • Lack of strategic planning:

A lack of strategic preparation can hinder the success of cloud migration. Firms risk delays, unexpected challenges, and higher expenses without a strategy. Smooth migration and maximum cloud adoption advantages require a well-defined migration plan.

  • Lack of strategy:

Planning and a relocation strategy are essential. Without a clear plan, misunderstanding, misalignment with corporate goals, and poor resource allocation can limit migration success.

  • Vendor lock-in:

Vendor lock-in can limit freedom and increase expenses when switching cloud service providers. To prevent vendor reliance, compatibility and portability must be considered.

  • Data security and compliance:

Data security and compliance are top priorities during cloud migration. Trust and legal compliance require protecting sensitive data and ensuring the cloud provider follows industry laws.

  • Staff skill gaps:

Cloud migration demands new skills. To address the complexity of the cloud environment, people must be trained in cloud architecture, security, and administration. Training and development are necessary to stay up with technology.

How can businesses ensure security and compliance in cloud migration?

This step involves incorporating strong security techniques to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of data while fulfilling compliance standards in cloud migration.

  • Assessing security risks in the cloud: This includes conducting an extensive analysis of all the security threats, such as potential vulnerabilities and risk of data exposure. Businesses need to safeguard the cloud environment from network-based attacks and unauthorized login attempts. Implementing intrusion detection and prevention systems proves helpful.
  • Implementing appropriate security measures: Implementing intrusion detection and prevention systems works effectively to mitigate risks. Businesses can use firewalls, network segmentation, and deploy incident response processes to track and respond to conflicts timely.
  • Addressing compliance requirements: Address the legal obligations to ensure the cloud migration complies with the industry-specific compliance standards.
  • Monitoring and managing security in the cloud: Monitor and manage the processes regularly to identify security loopholes. Other vital functions include SIEM (Security information and event management) and incident responses to track vulnerabilities and determine the efficiency of security processes.

How to optimize performance and cost efficiency in cloud migration?

To maximize the benefits of cloud migration, businesses need to focus on and execute strategies to optimize cost and increase performance.

  • Scaling resources in the cloud: This helps you adjust resources depending on their demand. For example, you can provision or de-provision resources depending on the workload pattern or specified thresholds. It is also possible to add resource instances horizontally and vertically to cope with increasing workload needs.
  • Monitoring and optimizing performance: Use tools to track the performance, find potential loopholes and methods to optimize them, enhancing code database queries to achieve high performance.
  • Cost optimization strategies and best practices: Right-sizing resources helps prevent overuse or underuse of the available resources and optimizes cost.
  • Implementing governance and cost management tools: Using the governance and costs management tools gives a unified view, control, and transparency over the resources and costs. For example, tagging and categorization specify costs for peculiar resources or projects.

How to manage cloud post-migration activities?

With the help of ongoing post-migration activities, businesses can ensure optimal performance and resilience of cloud environments.

  • Monitoring and troubleshooting: This includes measuring response time and latency, identifying errors and exceptions, and monitoring resource utilization to ensure the good health of the migrated assets.
  • Continuous improvement and optimization: It is essential to imbibe a practice of continuous improvement to boost the performance of the migrated applications and data.
  • Disaster recovery and backup: Discover recovery and backup strategies involve RTO (Recovery Time Objective), Recovery Point Objective (RPO), backup success rate, and regular testing and validation.

Managing vendor relationships and service level agreements: Strengthen the relationships between cloud vendors, and manage SLAs, to ensure compliance with the mutually agreed service levels.

What are the main types of cloud migration?

Cloud migration involves three main types of strategies and methodologies.

  • Full data center conversion:

The complete process of migrating an on-premises data center to the cloud is called a full data center conversion. Relocating servers, storage, and networking infrastructure to cloud-based equivalents is part of an all-inclusive strategy. It frequently involves rehosting techniques like "lift and shift," guaranteeing a smooth transition of all data center operations to the cloud, reducing downtime, and capitalizing on cloud scalability advantages.

  • Transfer of business process software support:

The primary goal of this kind of cloud migration is to relocate vital business process applications and software to the cloud. The focus is on locating and transferring specific software necessary for critical business activities instead of moving the complete data center. Using this approach, businesses can take advantage of cloud benefits on a selective basis, optimizing resources and expediting the conversion process for apps that are important to their operations.

  • Optimization of web/mobile applications:

"Web/mobile app optimization" improves app scalability and performance in cloud environments. This strategy, frequently linked to rearchitecting and refactoring, entails optimizing programs to use cloud-native capabilities like Platform as a Service (PaaS). It ensures that apps are not just migrated to the cloud but optimized for optimal performance, security, and user-friendliness.

What are the cloud migration types?

The cloud migration landscape has numerous variations for different organizational goals:

  • Full on-premises data center exit:

This involves moving an entire on-premises data center, including servers, storage, networking, and other components, to the cloud. This all-encompassing strategy, also known as "lift and shift," seeks to smoothly transfer the current on-premises infrastructure to the cloud.

  • Migrating from one cloud to another:

Organizations can choose to switch cloud service providers. This might be due to cost, service, or commercial needs. Applications, data, and other resources are transferred from the source cloud provider to the target cloud provider for compatibility and no disruption.

  • Migrating specific applications or datasets:

Some organizations opt for a targeted approach by migrating specific applications or datasets to the cloud. This allows them to focus on important IT infrastructure components, streamlining and controlling migration. It entails testing application compatibility with the cloud environment.

  • Migrating specific workloads:

This migration includes moving individual workloads or computational processes to the cloud. Businesses identify operations, services, and processes that benefit from cloud scalability and performance. Workload migration involves shifting corporate processes, databases, or apps to the cloud while retaining other on-premises.

Cloud migration deployment models

  • Public cloud: Uses shared computer resources from third-party suppliers over the internet. It provides scalability, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility for enterprises seeking flexible, accessible computing.
  • Private cloud: Entails using private cloud infrastructure for a single enterprise. It supports sectors with strict legal requirements or privacy concerns due to its increased security, control, and customization.
  • Hybrid cloud: Merges public and private cloud environments, enabling enterprises to benefit from both. It allows workload-based data and application migration across on-premises and cloud environments.
  • Multi-cloud: Enables simultaneous use of services from various cloud providers. It gives businesses redundancy, reduces vendor lock-in, and lets them choose the finest services from numerous suppliers for their unique business needs.
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This approach lets organizations rent virtualized computing resources like servers and storage via the Internet. Scalable and flexible, it lets companies focus on application development without maintaining hardware.
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS): PaaS equips developers to design, deploy, and manage applications without managing infrastructure. Streamlining development improves efficiency and application time-to-market.
  • Software as a Service (SaaS): SaaS provides software programs online, removing the requirement for local installation, management, and maintenance. Various commercial applications benefit from its accessibility, automated upgrades, and cost reductions.

Cloud migration use cases

While there are hundreds of cloud implementations that can help organizations leverage the power of their data, these are some of the most common use cases for cloud migration.

Web Hosting

Organizations use the cloud’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capabilities to maintain a balance of server load. If traffic is suddenly or significantly increased, their cloud management tools are able to quickly react, provision, and scale up capabilities, ensuring users aren’t frustrated by long load times.

Big Data

Retail and social media businesses collect, store, and monetize large amounts of valuable information about their users’ behaviors. At the same time, most companies have begun collecting their own data to help them make informed decisions on everything from product development to marketing and more. Using HPE IaaS-based cloud services to interpolate, manage, and analyze this information can provide a powerful competitive advantage over the industry.

Disaster Recovery

With virtually unlimited data storage, it’s possible for organizations to automate and store complete data backups. When the unthinkable happens, this PaaS feature gives you quick point-and-click access to exactly what you need to get back up and running quickly.

Software Development

Before the cloud, building, testing, and deploying software could take years. The flexibility of cloud-based PaaS solutions gives development teams a far more synergistic way to increase workflow and productivity. With features like integrated process automation, debugging, compiling codebases, and project management, software development in the cloud has never been so robust.

HPE and cloud migration

From planning to implementation, HPE has a deep knowledge base and a dedicated staff of consultants to help position your cloud migration for success. With more than 1000 cloud transformations to date, we can help provide the right mix of clouds for your specific challenges, while also identifying potential blind spots in technology or skills.

The HPE Transformation Program gives you an objective view of your people, process, and technology while helping set up a Cloud Business Office (CBO). We can also provide financial analysis of your current IT infrastructure and potential costs of migrating to the cloud.

Our experts will help develop or evaluate your application migration plan, assisting you in anticipating which applications are best positioned for cloud migration. HPE additionally offers a Cloud-Native Software Development service, helping your teams work together to ensure application development and deployment are optimized.

Finally, HPE offers your organization DevOps training and certification, as well as Maturity Assessment, aligning your team around a common vision and how to reach it. No two organizations require the same amount of support, but HPE strives to ensure your cloud migration is a success.