Nine steps to build a successful cloud migration plan
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Nine steps to build a successful cloud migration plan
Jarin McClinton
26 April 2023
12 min read
Jarin McClinton
26 April 2023
12 min read
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Introduction
Assess your existing system landscape
Get your application cloud-ready
Cloud migration is a top priority for many organisations today. The drivers for the shift vary, ranging from improved scalability and IT effectiveness to providing better customer experiences and speeding up deployment.
But, no matter how straightforward your ecosystem is or how little infrastructure is being moved, cloud migration is a fairly complicated process. Migrations often wind up going over budget, taking much longer than expected, or failing completely, wasting time and expense. Which is why a systematic and documented plan is crucial.
In this post, we've boiled down the cloud migration process to nine key steps to give you a head start on your journey to the cloud.
Define and document your motivations
Cloud migrations aligned to key business outcomes are more likely to see success than siloed projects driven solely by the IT department.
Outline why you are migrating and modernising. Define the business outcomes that you want to achieve and your motivations. Are you looking to exit your Data Center? Increase cost savings? Gain new features? Improve performance and end-user experience? Leverage real-time data and analytics? Achieve greater scalability with IT resources on-demand?
The priority of your objectives will shape multiple choices in the later stages of the cloud migration process as you decide on the kind of cloud platforms, deployment models, applications, and resources you’ll need to navigate a successful shift.
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Assess your existing system landscape
You have to know your starting point to get where you want to go, so it’s important to inventory and assess your existing on-premise infrastructure.
An assessment will examine the technology your business uses and give you insights into how your organisation uses it. This will help IT and non-technical teams develop a clear picture of current business operations and provide insights into how to transition seamlessly to new systems and processes.
As you evaluate your existing system landscape, keep these questions in mind:
- Which applications are you currently using?
- What hardware and infrastructure (servers, databases, and storage) are you relying on?
- What are the technologies being used in your application portfolio?
- Which elements stand to benefit from cloud migration, and which either are not deemed feasible to migrate or likely to perform better on an on-premise infrastructure?
- What is your current level of investment in on-premise servers (licensing, hardware resource consumption, and support infrastructure costs)?
- Do you have data that needs to be resynced regularly, or specific data compliance requirements to meet?
Capture performance baselines for comparison
Set baseline metrics for your IT infrastructure to map workloads to your assets and applications. Baselining essentially refers to measuring the current (pre-migration) performance of your IT infrastructure in order to validate the post-migration performance improvements you expected.
Having a baseline understanding of where you currently stand is critical to understanding key pain points in your legacy infrastructure. Once you understand the specific aspects where you’re underperforming, your migration teams can focus on them for future attention.
You need to identify some of your most significant KPIs, such as page load times, response times, availability, CPU usage, memory usage, and conversion rates, and set a baseline performance range for each. This will show how your in-progress migration is doing and, most importantly, help you understand and determine when the migration is complete and successful.
Identify the right applications for migration
A comprehensive analysis of your existing architecture and applications will reveal answers to these key questions:
Can an application function optimally in the cloud?
Not every application is cloud-friendly. In some cases, moving older applications built on legacy OSes to the cloud doesn't make sense.
In contrast, it's easy to assume that compatibility and performance won't be an issue for newer applications that run on top of modern OSes since most cloud platforms allow you to allocate resources based on an as-required model.
Is any refactoring required before you migrate an application?
You may need to perform refactoring to optimise your applications for the cloud environment. Such refactoring will ensure they can make the most of dynamic cloud capabilities, potentially offering the flexibility for better resource utilisation and saving money on cloud service costs.
What is the cost involved?
While cloud migrations often do end up minimising costs, the financial benefits ultimately depend on the specific migration being executed.
For instance, legacy applications might become more expensive to run in the cloud because they are made up of chatty components. This means that during a typical function, they end up calling other services to fulfil requests. Such an architecture can, therefore, become quite costly to run in cloud environments.
Are there any security considerations that need to be addressed?
Mission-critical and sensitive workloads like financial data may not be ideal for public cloud environments.
Private or hybrid cloud (combination of private and public cloud infrastructures that lets workloads move between the two interconnected environments) is a better place for sensitive data as they can offer the scalability of the cloud, without the risk of compromising mission-critical information.
Select a cloud provider and pick the right deployment model
You need to choose the most suitable cloud service provider (like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure) for your organisation. Your choice will largely depend on your objectives, the architecture of the applications that must be migrated to the cloud, integrations, and other factors.
Adaptavist is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, which means if you choose AWS, we're perfectly positioned to deploy, run, and manage every aspect of your cloud experience. We can also support other cloud hosting options to help you meet your specific goals. Cloud migration is complex, but we can confidently help you move your applications and data to AWS.
You'll also need to pick the right deployment model for your workloads and decide whether public, private, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments best suit your specific requirements.
Public cloud offers a scalable environment on a pay-per-usage basis and can be tremendously beneficial for applications that experience unpredictable demands.
However, as discussed earlier, public cloud may not be ideal for mission-critical workloads. In such cases, private data centres or hybrid cloud environments are better options since they offer additional security and control.
On the other hand, multi-cloud environments make sense when you want to avoid vendor lock-in and ensure the flexibility to pick and choose from multiple cloud platforms. However, optimising your application to work with various cloud providers is relatively complex and requires a wide range of skill sets.
Want to find out more about cloud migration with Adaptavist and AWS? Discover our AWS services
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Get your application cloud-ready
When you move an application from an on-premise data center to the cloud, there are two typical migration models: lift and shift (rehost) and rearchitect (refactor).
Rehosting is basically moving an application to the cloud “as is” with no or limited changes. Any modification is just enough to get it to run in the cloud environment.
Whereas refactoring involves making changes to the application architecture to take advantage of cloud capabilities. This might be limited to auto-scaling and dynamic load balancing or as advanced as using serverless computing capabilities such as AWS Lambda for parts of the application.
Refactoring can require a lot of time and a wide range of skill sets from staff, so advanced planning is crucial. This process can also rack up upfront costs, especially for highly customised or legacy applications, but it can help slash ongoing costs.
Prepare a data migration plan
Data integrity is critical in any type of legacy migration process. If your data becomes inaccessible to users during a migration, you risk disrupting your normal operations. A robust data migration plan will play an important role in ensuring proper data governance and quality through continuous tracking and monitoring.
Extreme care must be taken to ensure that no data blocks are missed or deleted. We recommend backing up your data before embarking on data migration and thorough testing at each step to identify unexpected issues and address concerns. You’ll also need to be careful as you sync and update your systems after the initial migration is carried out.
The other issue is damage caused by changes in data security levels, which can lead to unauthorised access to sensitive data.
Databases are typically encrypted, so you must pay careful attention to encryption and decryption. If not properly handled, the migration of encrypted databases would result in data loss and introduce security vulnerabilities in the system.
As a best practice, we also advise implementing an automated test framework with full-stack security testing measures to check and fix vulnerabilities on a timely basis.
Execute your migration
Once you have a clear sense of what is moving, where it's going, and how it will work when it gets there, your migration activities are ready to begin. It goes without saying that the more complicated your architecture, the more careful you need to be.
The best practice is to start the process by migrating the least complex applications first, leaving any mission-critical applications for later in the cycle to help minimise downtime. However, some organisations first opt for a parallel operation model (using both cloud-based and on-premise applications) before fully transferring to the ported applications.
Rigorous monitoring and maintenance
Once you've landed in the new environment, your ongoing success is ultimately determined by the degree to which you implement proper maintenance and monitoring strategies to resolve any unanticipated challenges.
Regardless of how smooth the migration was, testing is necessary on multiple dimensions. As an organisation, you’ll need to review updates and security patches frequently and provide application and software updates to incorporate the changes. Plus, rigorous performance monitoring, load testing, and application-level testing are crucial to ensure that everything is running smoothly.
Planning, implementing, and accomplishing a successful cloud migration is time-consuming. Multiple moving parts and decision points can derail your in-house IT talent from their day-to-day tasks. That's why, in most cases, organisations seek an experienced third-party vendor to navigate migration and ensure continuous maintenance and monitoring.
Stressed about your upcoming cloud migration project?
Written by
Jarin McClinton
Global Head of Professional Services
With over 10 year's experience as a scrum master, solutions architect, and technical consultant, Jarin has intimate knowledge of how to solve complex business problems with technology. He oversees our global consultancy, delivering strategies that enhance customer satisfaction and drive growth.
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