- 1. Evaluating the cost of migration or rather the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
- 2. Assigning the tasks to different cloud service providers depending on the services they provide.
- 3. Assessing the TCO under various load patterns. It is because more often TCOs are, based on a static pattern of use.
The strategy of business objectives and roadmap
Cloud migration is not just a technology exercise, but it needs to be rooted in business outcomes. That’s why the first and foremost key issue for companies is to evaluate their business goals and develop a migration strategy that will help them get there. It can answer three basic questions.
Why move to the cloud?
Companies must go through their current infrastructure minutely and define their goals - what they hope to achieve when moving to the cloud - accordingly. The goal can be anything like, to achieve a massive reduction in their IT costs or it can also be to outsource various business functions.
Are we ready to fundamental change?
Technology has the potential to change the way of business by default - if allowed. Companies’ business process must be flexible enough to take advantage of the insights they gain by adopting cloud culture.
What’s the benefit of our customer?
In this digital era, a well-built cloud system allows businesses to meet increased demands like personalized products, interactions, services, of customers. That’s why your cloud migration strategy needs to be laser-focused on how to better serve your customers according to their needs.
Security concerns
For most CTOs/CIOs, security concern is the biggest issue while moving their data to the cloud. It could be a problem, even when you know the cloud environment is secure. To solve this issue, you can discuss this in detail with your Cloud Service Provider (CSP) before moving. On the other hand, CSPs have their specific advanced systems and security measures to safeguard your data, detect threats, and prevent attacks
Cost of migration
The fear that almost all the enterprises have is that cloud computing strategy can lead to, exponential costs, and at the end of migration, they will get a huge bill. No doubt it happens but, you can save lots of money by:
All the above, ROI should be calculated. Isn’t it?
Make sure your applications are ready for cloud migration
One of the biggest reasons for the failure of a cloud migration strategy is to migrate the applications that are not ready for the cloud. Before deciding to move businesses to the cloud, companies should make sure their apps are ready for cloud migration.
Design complexity
Traditional apps are usually complex and rigid, so transferring them to the cloud cannot be easy. Even, the customers might not be willing to reuse them. That’s why it is always important to have a distributed architecture and scalable design to enable cloud migration.
Integration complexity
It is very important to check the application’s integration points like SMTP servers, web services, third-party vendors, payment gateways, and how the cloud migration process would affect their dependencies. Once you do that, you can also improve the challenges, which will usually be in connectivity or authentication blisters.
Database
Undoubtedly, the database is a critical part of the application, and its migration is not an easy task. That’s why it is important to check the following two points with CSPs:
a. Are they fully equipped to deal with migrating petabytes of data?
b. Do they have the provision for a rollback in case of any unexpected challenges?
Operating system
Before initiating cloud migration, you must check the compatibility of your application’s OS with that of your CSP. If there is an issue, you might have to find a compatible OS to run your applications.
Cloud management and optimization
Like many other people, you also think that "lift and shift" Cloud transit, due to its popularity, is it also right for you? If yes, think again!
It doesn't suit everyone. People generally think that moving, to the cloud means moving from one data center to another, cheaper and with more resources.
But wait, the picture is different.
Cloud migration means adopting a new paradigm, implementing cloud orchestration, automation, and everything as a service (Xaas); using third-party components instead of implementing your own.
That’s why simply moving to the cloud isn’t the end of the game.
A company might have to invest time and effort to design the enterprise architecture and needs to continually work to optimize what’s in the cloud to maximize its cloud investments.