What Is Cloud Migration? Importance, Benefits, and Strategy

For one, it tends to have low latency (processing a high volume of data with no delays on the user side) and high availability (systems uptime)—two essential components to high-performing tools. In 2020, the pace of asset migration to cloud increased by a factor of 24, according to McKinsey. That same year, we asked Atlassian customers who’d made the switch from server to cloud to tell us about their experiences, via a survey from Tech Validate. Finally, it’s also worthwhile preparing for life when your migration is complete, so consider what can be done to get the most out of your new cloud subscription prior to moving over. There are lots of routes to consider aside from the obvious data back-ups.

Cloud infrastructure and applications let organizations quickly respond to new opportunities and problems by tapping into technology innovations. IT teams can implement new cloud applications faster because there’s no data center hardware to buy and deploy or software to install. After going live on cloud apps, users regularly gain access to new cloud app capabilities without having to install software upgrades. As teams no longer have to worry about buying and provisioning hardware, databases, and containers, new development projects can be set up in AppDev environments in minutes.

Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

And if you do make the move, there are huge benefits to on offer—including improvements to your firm’s bottom line and environmental impact. Next, it’s time to figure out which aspects of your operation need to be on the cloud. Some parts, such as payroll and collaborative documents, are a no-brainer, but that might not be the case across the board. Legacy applications, for example, might not be compatible with some cloud platforms and might be easier to leave in your local network. In fact, most cloud service providers are certified to handle these types of confidential information and meet compliance and privacy standards.

Users accessing a website or application with a self-signed certificate will be presented with a warning, which can make it easier for attackers to impersonate the website and potentially compromise the system. View webinars and learn how many organizations have accelerated their migration to the AWS cloud, and their time to results by working with APN Competency Partners. New research finds that training enables organizations to accelerate cloud adoption, achieve business objectives sooner, and overcome cloud concerns. The actual migration of applications, workloads, and data occurs in this phase. In retiring, you turn off assets that you no longer require or that are outdated in the modern cloud computing environment.

Cost-saving

You will need to understand the data, technical, financial, resource, and security requirements and decide on the necessary operations for the migration. Nonetheless, this is the migration method that allows for total flexibility and brings you all the benefits of the cloud to its fullest extent. Refactoring lets you prioritize business processes by moving less critical ones to the cloud, first. This method is cost-effective, improves response time, cloud cost management and helps in prioritizing updates for better interactions. In addition to evaluating the use of self-signed certificates from a technical standpoint, it’s also important to consider the organizational factors that may drive their use. In some cases, product teams may be under pressure to deliver products quickly and may resort to using self-signed certificates in non-customer facing systems or in development environments to save time and money.

Cloud migration comes with many different advantages and business solutions, but moving to a cloud platform may be easier said than done. You must take into consideration several factors before initiating the migration process. And you may likely face many challenges both during the strategy development stage and during the actual migration process. While part of this stage is related to the first one, you must choose the best-suited cloud deployment model considering both the organization and the resources at hand. A single or multi-cloud solution will need to be planned based on the types of resources that are required. If you are a small or medium scale organization with minimal resources, the public cloud is the recommended option.

Navigating the barriers to maximizing cloud value

Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid clouds make use of public and private clouds, and in some cases, they also integrate on-premises data centers. Hybrid clouds can be configured in numerous ways to meet an organization’s unique needs, and the final design is often based on what data needs to be tightly controlled and what data can be stored using shared resources. Or an organization might use the public cloud to house nonproprietary, less sensitive data and a private cloud for data such as health records or sensitive customer information with higher regulatory obligations. When using a hybrid cloud, it’s most important to have a clear plan for the functionality, security, and performance of each element to help ensure a highly available and smooth operation. Cloud migration is the movement of data, applications, computing capacity, and other digital assets from an organization’s on-premises data center to a data center run by a cloud provider.

• Such planning is essential to keep operations running while an organization cuts over to cloud-based systems.
• The company had two data centers and if there were problems in the primary one, they had outages.
• I have extensive in-house and agency copywriting experience across many industries, specialising in tech, entertainment, and current and consumer affairs.
• This process of moving services and applications to the cloud is the basic definition of Cloud Migration.
• In refactoring, you rearchitect applications to take full advantage of cloud-centered features.

Retiring happens when you look closely at an on-premises application and realize its functionality is hardly used or no longer needed. Saying goodbye to these apps can deliver a big win from the cloud migration process because you’re eliminating redundancy or vestigial processes that cost you money but no longer deliver value. Retiring an application does take time and planning because there can be dependencies with other applications that need to be addressed before you turn it off. Depending on your provider, the cloud can also offer cast-iron security against malicious parties.

Cloud services use this power and flexibility to replace your need for maintaining on-premise software applications. Some examples include project management (Mavenlink), customer relationship management (Salesforce), email (G Suite) and document signing (PandaDoc). In addition to the direct cost savings in comparison to maintaining your own data centers, cloud migration provides indirect benefits for cost savings in the form of not requiring a dedicated technical team. Another benefit is that most licensing requirements are taken care of by the service provider.

Security and compliance are built in at the core to protect your most business-critical workloads and most sensitive data. The global pandemic has seen more and more companies accelerate their move to the cloud, reinventing their offerings, and becoming more cost-efficient, agile, and innovative in how they operate their businesses. Our cost analysis easily showed that we could spend less per year on cloud than server, as well as get more features/integrations and less downtime. In 2019, network performance became the number one reason to move to cloud, according to one survey.