A Comprehensive Guide to the Cloud Migration Process

We have made incremental progress since the days of large desktop computers and slow-witted internet connections, haven’t we? In today’s value-driven and innovation-intensive era, businesses must evolve to stay relevant. As enterprises grow and their data increases, so does the complexity of maintaining their outdated on-premises infrastructure.

Additionally, legacy systems can’t handle oscillating workloads, leading to inefficiencies, increased expenses, and lost opportunities. As digital transformation becomes the key to success, cloud migration consulting may allow companies to run more efficiently and economically. 

Migrating to the cloud may open many business opportunities, including improved collaboration, real-time scalability, data-driven insights, and strengthened security. According to reports, 60% of businesses agree that cloud capabilities contributed to higher and more stable revenue in 2023.  

This cloud application development guide will discuss cloud migration benefits, steps, strategies, challenges, and how moving to the cloud may completely transform your company.

What is Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration involves moving a company’s digital assets, IT resources, services, databases, and applications from on-premises infrastructure to a public cloud platform like AWS, GCP, or Azure. 

To reap the benefits of cloud computing security services, businesses are now looking to replace outdated and inefficient legacy infrastructures, such as aging servers or potentially unreliable firewalls. 

Enterprise cloud migration can help eliminate hardware or software solutions that aren’t performing at their best. 

What are the Benefits of Cloud Migration for Businesses?

The fundamental strength of the cloud is its elastic infrastructure. The benefits of moving to the cloud can appear in a variety of ways, such as but not restricted to:

• Lower Capital Expenditure (CapEx)

By migrating to the cloud, substantial upfront expenditures for infrastructure and hardware are no longer necessary. A Nucleus Research report shows that cloud apps deliver an ROI 4.01 times higher than on-premises applications.

The leading cause is the transition from capital to operating expenditures, freeing up funds for strategic projects.

• Improved Agility and Scalability

According to Gartner, CIOs rank operational agility as the primary factor influencing cloud adoption. Cloud-based services enable teams to work remotely on application upgrades or problems rather than in person. 

They can even dynamically scale capacity to expand or change demand. This degree of stability can give businesses a significant competitive advantage.

• Smaller Infrastructure Footprint

You only utilize the energy and resources you require since server capacity adjusts to meet your cloud demands. 

One of the benefits of moving to the cloud is that you can even reduce your data center pool to one or even zero for a significant environmental impact. 

• Reliable Disaster Recovery

Although disaster recovery has historically been costly for smaller organizations, this is significant for companies of all sizes. More businesses use the cloud to deploy backup and recovery solutions, requiring less time and initial funding. 

Cloud services provide redundancy across several geographic locations and sophisticated backup methods. According to IDC, businesses that have migrated to the cloud claim a 96% decrease in downtime.

• Enhanced Security

Because the cloud stores your apps and critical data centrally, it provides more security than data centers. Moreover, cloud transformation services providers regularly release security upgrades to prevent unauthorized traffic from accessing your data. 

It frees you from security risks and lets you focus on your company’s priorities. 

RapidScale reports that 94% of companies saw improved security after moving to the cloud.

What is Cloud Readiness Assessment and How to Get Started?

A readiness assessment should be the first step in any analytics project, regardless of size, to ensure everything is covered. Examine your present environment before moving to the cloud, including your data, regulatory and security issues, on-premises and cloud infrastructure, apps, dependencies, remote workforces, and business objectives. 

If you have a solid grasp of your operations and current assets, you can choose the optimal course of action for your cloud migration strategy.​

A cloud readiness assessment should consist of the following steps:

• Gather Key Information

Collaborate with your cloud computing company and business stakeholders to identify areas of misalignment and common objectives. 

Everyone should be aware of the implications of cloud migration and the anticipated outcomes at the end of the project.​

• Define Objectives and Opportunities

Consider your goals for cloud adoption and migration. Are you trying to cut costs by retiring data centers or reducing capital expenditures? Or do you want auto scaling and quick hardware modifications to boost performance? 

Or perhaps your goal is to become more agile so that you can try new things and succeed/fail. Prioritize the goals with the most potential value by documenting them up front and calculating the return on investment.

• Assess Cultural Readiness 

This stage, which is sometimes disregarded, is crucial because significant stakeholders must be ready for the shift that the cloud and the migration process bring. Does your company have what it takes to pay its technological debt and abandon outdated systems? 

Are you open to a cloud-native approach that prioritizes agility over simply lifting and shifting to a new data center? If your key stakeholders view cloud migration as just moving to a cheaper data center, they’re missing its full potential and objectives.

• Decide What to Migrate

You must determine which infrastructure, procedures, and apps will be moved to the cloud. Given networking latency and data quantities, this is particularly pertinent to data and analytics workloads. Additionally, licensing requirements must be considered in this phase. 

• Calculate Current TCO 

Server costs are just one aspect of the TCO. Other considerations include physical data center property, cooling, energy, disaster recovery, physical security, hardware, and licensing. 

Even though the cloud offers a chance to save money, you will incur additional expenses if you do not intend to decommission existing resources. 

A Step-by-Step Cloud Migration Process

Every cloud migration plan is unique depending on the size and scale of your migration project, your migration approach, the complexity of your data processing and storage needs, etc. 

The standard cloud migration steps are mentioned below.

• Cloud Migration Conceptualization 

(Estimated Time– 1 to 2 weeks)

• Set objectives for cloud migration platforms, such as market reach, cutting IT infrastructure modernization expenses, and boosting business app performance.
• Choose which workloads like databases, virtual desktops, corporate apps, and data warehouses should be moved to the cloud.
• Map the workflow relationships to determine the scope of cloud migration and examine their complexity.

• Select a Cloud Migration Strategy

(Estimated Time – 1 to 2 weeks)

Pick one of the following cloud migration strategies—rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retire, retain, or a mix of these. 

Here are the types of cloud migration options.

• Rehosting 

It is also called the “lift-and-shift” method that moves workloads from on-premises to IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) without changing the code. 

Migration to the cloud is quick and inexpensive, but it has limited cloud-driven characteristics (scalability, performance, and workload resilience).

• Replatforming 

Often known as “lift, tinker, and shift,” this method moves updated workloads to the cloud without changing the workload architecture. 

This enhances the moved workloads’ scalability, fault tolerance, and performance.

• Refactoring 

This is also known as “rearchitecting,” which involves making on-premises workloads cloud-native (or nearly native) and migrating them to PaaS (Platform as a Service). 

You will get a full range of cloud features, such as serverless computing and automated cloud migration. 

• Repurchasing 

Typically referred to as “drop and shop,” this method involves using SaaS application development instead of an on-premises solution. 

In this, data migration to the cloud is quick and low-risk.

• Choose a Cloud Deployment Model

(Estimated Time – 4 to 6 days)

There are various cloud deployment models. You should choose the one that fits your business goals and helps in driving agility. 

• Single Cloud 

A single multi-tenant cloud environment for your workload deployment. However, there is a vendor lock-in risks associated with single cloud deployment.

• Multi-Cloud 

Moving your workloads or portions of them to various public clouds is known as multi-cloud migration. 

It involves using the main benefits offered by cloud service providers (for instance, one offers faster databases, while another offers more advanced AI capabilities).

• Hybrid Cloud 

Hybrid cloud migration is a mix of private and public clouds hosted and controlled on-site by the business. 

For instance, the public cloud’s cost advantages can be used for other activities while applications with particular security needs are placed on the private cloud.

• Choose the Right Cloud Platform

(Estimated Time – 2 to 8 weeks)

In this phase, you must select one or more cloud platforms, such as Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Azure, etc.

Use Proof-of-Concept (PoC) to validate that the migrated workloads are compatible with the cloud and specific cloud platforms.

• Cloud Migration Planning and Designing

(Estimated Time – 4 to 6 weeks)

• You must determine your workload’s cloud computing resource needs to prevent purchasing unnecessary resources.
• After that, create a risk management strategy to predict and reduce risks, such as overspending due to a poorly designed workload or compromised data security during data migration.

• Then, you must calculate the ROI and evaluate the cloud migration costs.

• Set up key performance indicators (KPIs) for cloud infrastructure migration, such as error rate, availability, and reaction time.

• Determine how much refactoring is required for the workloads that are being migrated.

• Ask your cloud migration company to choose the best cloud migration assessment tools.
• Design the workload migration architecture.
• Prioritize the workloads that need to be migrated and create a schedule for your cloud migration solutions.

• Migrate to the Cloud

(Estimated Time – 5 to 21 weeks)

At this stage, the migration-related activities include the following things—

• Using the new workload design to create a new production environment.
• Transferring data associated with workloads for migration. 
• Data migration should be carried out continuously during the migration process to keep the cloud database updated.
• Legacy modernization services providers will migrate workloads.
• Install tools for cloud monitoring.

• Test and Optimize the Cloud Environment

(Estimate Time: 1 to 8 weeks)

This is a crucial phase in cloud migration. Testing deployment workloads help uncover issues or bugs.

• Evaluate the cloud environment’s performance of the migrated solutions.
• Perform penetration testing of the new environment.
• Perform a technical audit to find operational issues and a regulatory compliance review (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR, etc.) of the cloud infrastructure and the migrated workloads.
• Enhance cybersecurity (if necessary) and maximize cloud efficiency.

• Shift Workload to the Cloud

(Estimate Time: At once, within 2 to 4 weeks) 

At this point, the migration is finished, and your cloud environment is live. The on-premises infrastructure of the migrated workloads can be turned off upon going live, or it can be retained for backup purposes or as part of a hybrid cloud deployment.

Effective Cloud Migration Strategies Before Going Live

Implementing your end-to-end cloud migration solutions will prevent problems or interruptions to your business operations. Before going live, confirm the most effective method for prioritizing and migrating apps, as not all workloads benefit from operating on cloud-based infrastructure. 

Follow these six steps to carry out your cloud migration planning effectively—

• Set Up the Framework

This covers the cloud provider and configuring, networking, security, tagging, cloud cost optimization, automation, and identity access management.

• Migrate Your Data

You may begin with a single database, work on it gradually, or complete it all simultaneously.

• Move Applications

Connectivity should be established, all configurations should be checked, scheduled tasks executed, etc.

• Validate and Document

Before going live, ensure the data is reliable, authentic, and consistent. This will also help identify potential issues and hurdles during the cloud migration process. 

• Optimize and Adapt

To become used to the cloud, you will always need minor adjustments. Therefore, you should start with basic optimizations.

• Perform Cutover

You should move your network traffic from the existing endpoints to the newly deployed environment. However, this can also result in downtime risks, data loss, and errors. It’s best to start planning at least 3 months before the cutover.

Crucial Factors Affecting the Cloud Migration Costs

The cost of cloud migration ranges from $5,000 to $100,000 or more, depending on the location, expertise, team structure, and required app modernization.

Cost Considerations for Cloud Migration

• The quantity and difficulty of the workloads that need to be moved.
• Selected migration plan (re-architecting, re-hosting, etc.). 
• Models of cloud deployment (public, multi-cloud, and hybrid). Keep in mind that hybrid and multi-cloud deployment solutions are costly.
• The volume of data requiring transfer.
• The cost of migration automation software licenses.
• Testing capabilities. 

Cost Factors Post Migration

• Educate your internal IT staff or hire cloud consulting services to train them.
• The recurring cost of cloud migration services and infrastructure primarily relies on storage, network bandwidth, and data centers’ physical locations.

What are the Challenges in Cloud Migration?

Ensuring a seamless application migration is a significant task for today’s IT professionals. The migration process can be dangerous even if you have chosen the best cloud provider. 

Crucial situations to be mindful of include—

• Downtime

It may temporarily shut down in-house servers during the migration process. However, without adequate backup or resource allocation, disruptions might have a catastrophic effect on application performance and, consequently, client loyalty.

• Interoperability

Getting your existing apps to work well with recent cloud environments is complex. You may need to modify your procedures to match those of your cloud provider.

• Legacy Apps

Not all apps can be transferred easily. Choosing which to leave and rebuild and which to keep may be confusing. Moreover, legacy application modernization needs custom fixes to run in the cloud, which can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. 

• Data Loss

When your company moves to the cloud, its data is most exposed. Some of it may not be accessible or might be compromised. 

Implementing cloud security rules like privileged access management and app encryption must be done with great care to reduce the danger of a compromise.

• Resource Management

Staff accustomed to overseeing physical servers may need to be trained on the new setup. In other situations, adopting the cloud changes the core of operations or creates new IT management positions.

Looking for Cloud Migration Services and Solutions?

SparxIT’s cloud migration services offer a progressive suite of services to assist our clients in transforming current applications and achieving “future-ready” business outcomes from strategy to execution. Our all-encompassing strategy is supported by the understanding that successful cloud migration services and solutions necessitate a versatile combination of appropriate planning with different risk and reward profiles.

Our enterprise application migration services are scalable for one or more apps and offer comprehensive and reliable procedures for moving large application portfolios to cloud platforms. We use tried-and-tested tools that can assist with application inventory, assessment, code analysis, and migration planning.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q:1 What are the key steps involved in a successful cloud migration process?

A: Key steps include assessing readiness, selecting a strategy, migrating data and applications, optimizing, and ensuring security and compliance post-migration.

Q:2 What tools are available to streamline cloud migration?

A: Tools like AWS Migration Hub, Azure Migrate, Google Cloud Migration Center, and third-party solutions like CloudEndure simplify and automate migration processes.

Q:3 What is the average cost of migrating to the cloud?

A: The cost of migrating to the cloud can range from $5,000 to $100,000, which relies on the complexity, data volume, and migration strategy. Larger enterprises may have to spend more, particularly for complex systems and multiple applications.

Q:4 Can small businesses benefit from cloud migration?

A: Cloud migration can greatly transform small businesses. It offers cost-effectiveness, scalability, and enhanced security, which makes it a superb choice for businesses of varied sizes.