The use of clouds is expanding! To achieve operational excellence, organisations are investing an increasing amount of money. However, according to Unisys data, one-third of all cloud migrations fail. The same study indicates that 77% of companies with cloud adoption at the forefront of their corporate strategy experienced significant to modest enhancements in operational efficiency.
A thorough planning process is necessary if you want to get a high return on investment when transferring mission-critical apps and data to the cloud. Without a solid plan, your cloud migration is likely to result in more problems and financial losses than advantages for your company.
What is Cloud Migration?
The process of partially or completely transferring a company's digital assets, services, databases, IT resources, and applications to the cloud is known as cloud migration. Moving from one cloud to another is another aspect of cloud migration.
Cloud Migration Checklist
On the checklist for cloud migration are:
- Create the position of migration architect.
- Determine the degree of your cloud integration.
- Go with a single cloud or several clouds.
- Create cloud KPIs
- Identify performance benchmarks
- Make migration components a priority.
- Perform any refactoring that is required.
- Make a plan for data migration.
- Change the production
- Review the distribution of application resources.
Steps by Step Cloud Migration Checklist
Some steps to create migration checklist are given as follows-
Step 1 - Create the position of migration architect.
Establish the role of the migration architect to lead the endeavour before you start your cloud migration. The migration architect is a system architect-level position in charge of organising and carrying out every aspect of the migration. Their primary duties should include defining the refactoring necessary to ensure the migration's success, designing data migration strategies, defining the needs for cloud solutions, and selecting migration priorities and production switchover procedures.
Step 2 - Determine the degree of your cloud integration.
There are two methods you may use to migrate an application to the cloud from an on-premises data centre: a shallow cloud integration or a deep cloud integration.
The on-premises application is moved to the cloud as part of a shallow cloud integration, often known as a "lift-and-shift," with little to no changes made to the cloud servers that you create to execute the application. Just the right amount of modifications are required to make an application work in the new setting. You don't make use of cloud-specific services. Because the application is lifted "as is" and shifted to the cloud intact, this model is often referred to as lift-and-shift.
Step 3 - Go with a single cloud or several clouds.
It's not difficult to adapt your application to work with a certain cloud provider. Your development teams just need to master one set of cloud APIs, and your application can utilise all that your selected cloud provider has to offer.
The drawback of this strategy is vendor lock-in. Moving your application to a different provider after you've changed it to only work with that one provider could be just as difficult as the initial cloud migration. Additionally, having a single cloud provider may make it more difficult for you to negotiate crucial terms with the cloud provider, such as pricing and SLAs.
Step 4 - Create cloud KPIs
The measurements you collect about your application or service—known as key performance indicators, or KPIs—are used to compare how well it is performing to your expectations. Even if you've already established some KPIs for your applications and services, do they still apply to those when they're hosted in the cloud? The finest KPIs for a cloud migration demonstrate how your migration is progressing and highlight any visible or hidden issues that might be present in your application. The ability to use cloud migration KPIs to gauge the progress and completion of the migration may be the most crucial.
Step 5 - Identify performance benchmarks
Baselining is the process of evaluating your application's or service's present (pre-migration) performance in order to decide whether its future (post-migration) performance will be acceptable. Baselines confirm the post-migration performance improvements you anticipated and assist you in determining when your migration is complete. Baselines can also be used to identify any issues that develop during a cloud migration.
Step 6 - Make migration components a priority.
Additionally, you need to select if you'll move your application to the cloud all at once, piecemeal, or service by service.
To start, figure out how your services are related to one another and which services rely on which other services. Use an application performance monitoring tool that can create dependency diagrams from service maps for larger, more complicated applications. Determine which components should be migrated and in what order using the dependency diagram. Starting with the services that have the fewest dependencies is frequently a good idea. In this situation, you would migrate your internal services first, followed by your external services, which are often those that are closest to your clients.
Step 7 - Perform any refactoring that is required.
Before migrating your applications and services, you might want to make further changes to ensure that they operate as effectively and efficiently as possible in the cloud. You might want to refactor your application.
As a result, it allows for dynamic scaling with a variable number of operating instances, potentially saving you money on cloud service fees.
Step 8 - Make a plan for data migration.
One of the most challenging aspects of a cloud migration is data migration. The placement of your data can have a big effect on how well your application works. Performance may suffer if you move your data to the cloud when most of your data access methods are still on-premises. The same is true if the service that accesses the data is located in the cloud but the data itself is still on-premises.
Step 9 - Change the production
When and how do you migrate a production system from an ageing on-premises solution to a fresh cloud-based one? The complexity and design of your application, particularly the design of your data and datastores, will determine the response.
Step 10 - Review the distribution of application resources.
There are still a few things to think about even after you've finished moving everything to the cloud. Resource optimization is crucial. When resources (such as servers) are allocated statically, you are not utilising the benefits of the cloud, which is geared for dynamic resource allocation. Make sure your teams have a strategy for allocating resources to your application when you transition to the cloud. When you need to add more resources to a cloud application, the vendor often makes them available in almost any quantity at any time.
Cloud MiConclusion
Even though switching to the cloud is frequently a no-brainer, transferring programmes to the cloud is sometimes difficult or only partially successful for many firms. You can begin planning your cloud adoption without worrying about expensive mistakes if you follow the checklist for cloud migration provided above.
