Cloud services are an essential requirement in today’s advancing business environment. Moving to cloud has now become more important than ever, considering the rapidly intensifying competition and evolving business needs. More so, with the Covid-19 pandemic ushering in severe waves of turbulence, the need for a shift towards cloud technology has become extremely dire.
Experts believe that cloud services will continue to be at the forefront of the 4IR world and will be the talisman to solve for the most complex business challenges. What more evidence does one need that cloud is the future when enterprise cloud spending is increasing at a CAGR of 16% by 2026. It is evident that enterprises are no longer looking at cloud migration, application migration, cloud modernization, and the overall cloud technology as a simple tool for better accessibility and scalability but in fact a strategic enabler for their businesses.
What is Cloud Migration?
Movement of company’s datasets, applications, IT resources and other essential business components from the existing legacy infrastructure to a secure cloud environment is referred to as cloud migration. Often, this service includes other elements like backup and disaster recovery, data migration, data quality check, assessment and migration, data integration, data warehouses, among others.
For businesses which are already operating on the cloud, migration would entail movement from one cloud to the other, or to a hybrid cloud environment which is also commonly known as cloud-to-cloud migration. A company could choose to migrate either some, or all of its data sets, workloads, and applications to the cloud, depending upon its specific business requirements.
Why Cloud Migration?
Needless to say, businesses, in large numbers, are making a huge rush towards cloud in order to stay agile and competitive. Below listed are some of the benefits that cloud solutions offer to businesses worldwide –
- Cost-effectiveness – Cloud migration services come at fairly nominal prices, and also eliminate the need for enterprises to set up or maintain their own personal servers and storage systems. Moreover, one could bid adieu to all the operational costs such as maintaining IT personnel for administration, upgradation expenses, etc. Cloud vendors typically offer pay-as-you-go pricing, implying that one needs to only pay for the computing power being used.
- Increased Security – This is a prime advantage for businesses, as the security of their data and servers is always a key concern. Cloud solutions offer the highest level of security, as they adhere to the best-in-class security practices, which are duly compliant with the industry regulations. All the company’s confidential data is safeguarded, ensuring hassle-free business operations.
- Scalability, performance and efficiency – Cloud solutions are easily scalable and can easily accommodate any kind of changes in the workload migration strategy. A spike in demand would not shake a company’s IT infrastructure, as these solutions enables one to instantly and automatically respond to any fluctuations in demand. This, in turn, assures optimum performance and efficiency.
- Superior Customer Experiences – Well, it’s not new that the customer needs are constantly evolving in the current environment. Cloud migration ensures a perfect experience for customers, as they get the freedom to access data from anywhere, anytime, with just a few clicks.
How to Migrate to the Cloud?
A smooth cloud migration process isn’t possible without a carefully laid-out cloud migration strategy. After all, this means building a fresh technology infrastructure, which is certainly a big deal for any company. A sound strategy chooses the best approach to cloud migration from lift and shift and other such approaches that we will discuss in the next in this series of the blog.
Thus, in order to migrate effectively, one needs to keep in mind the below points –
Cloud Migration Approach
- Need Analysis – Begin by identifying the applications that need to move to cloud. Not all applications will benefit by running on cloud infrastructure. Some could be risky to migrate, while others could bring maximum benefit. Therefore, it is important to study the size and complexity of your existing IT environment. Identify and define the need for cloud migration and what is it that you foresee and want to achieve.
- Choosing the right cloud platform – Once you understand your existing IT environment, the next step is to determine the cloud migration process and the specific cloud environment that would be apt for your business – public, private or hybrid. Weigh the pros and cons of each in relation to your business requirements before taking the leap. Moving ahead, choose your cloud provider – Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, etc. Prioritize the order of movement of applications to cloud.
- Migrate and Evaluate – It is important for enterprises to compare the pre and post migration efficiency and performance, in order to know the value derived. Therefore, put in place appropriate evaluation tools which could bring forth the results to give you a better picture.
Before we go…
Going forward, cloud technology is bound to become the normal for all enterprises, irrespective of their size and type. It is an era of transformation and catching up with the flow is vital for all. Businesses who fail to make the switch might put themselves at risk of becoming obsolete. Yes, cloud is the future.
But we would like to remind you that your move to the cloud, assessment and migration, a deep understanding of source systems, ensuring zero data loss, maintaining high data quality, and doing all this with zero downtime is not simple. Thus, you will need a strong cloud partner with proven expertise and certifications on Azure cloud and other public cloud solutions. Acuvate has performed several high impact cloud migration and modernization projects with ease and simplicity for organizations of all sizes. We also have extensive experience in managed services to ensure that all you need to worry about is your business. We will take care of the technology you need.
