Choosing the right on premise to cloud migration strategy is crucial when transitioning applications to the cloud. A well-defined approach to cloud migration will ensure minimal disruption to your business operations while maximize cost efficiency. It will also help you leverage the full potential of cloud capabilities. The first step to building an effective on premise to cloud migration strategy is to assess your existing IT infrastructure. This will help you understand the specific needs of your business so you can identify the right cloud service approach. Each strategy offers distinct advantages, and the choice depends on the benefits you are looking to get from your migration. Thorough planning and a clear roadmap are essential to avoid pitfalls and ensure a smooth on premise to cloud migration.
In addition, selecting an appropriate on premise to cloud migration strategy can significantly enhance your application performance, scalability, and security. Migrating to the cloud provides an opportunity to modernize your IT environment, improve data management, and implement advanced analytics. A well-executed on premise to cloud migration strategy will help your business to scale resources according to demand. This ensures optimal performance during peak times without the overhead of maintaining extensive on-premise infrastructure. Security is another critical consideration. Cloud providers offer robust security measures, including encryption, compliance certifications, and regular updates.
In this article, we will cover the three major approaches to migrating your company’s applications to the cloud. We’ll also dig into the steps needed for a successful migration and the most popular cloud service providers. By choosing the right on premise to cloud migration strategy, you can achieve a seamless migration, improved operational efficiency, and a future-proof IT infrastructure that supports long-term growth.
Choosing the Right On Premise to Cloud Migration Strategy
Businesses planning an on premise to cloud migration should consider several strategies, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. Each strategy aligns with different business needs and objectives. Here’s an overview of the three major cloud migration strategies for on premise applications:
- Lift-and-Shift: Lift-and-shift, also known as rehosting, involves moving applications and data from an on-premises data center to the cloud with minimal or no changes. This strategy is often chosen for its simplicity and speed. It allows businesses to quickly benefit from the cloud’s scalability and cost-efficiency without extensive modifications to your applications or infrastructure. Lift-and-shift is ideal for companies looking to migrate quickly due to time constraints or to reduce data center dependencies. Many companies then plan more significant transformations for a later stage.
- Lift-and-Extend: Lift-and-extend goes a step beyond mere rehosting by not only moving applications and data to the cloud but also leveraging cloud-native services to enhance or extend the application’s functionality. This strategy allows you to more fully exploit the benefits of the cloud, including improved scalability, resilience, and agility. With lift-and-extend, companies can also integrate with cloud services like advanced analytics, machine learning, or automated scaling. It is best for organizations looking to get more from their investment by adopting some capabilities without a complete overhaul.
- Move-and-Improve: Move-and-improve, often called refactoring or rearchitecting, involves making significant changes to the application’s architecture as part of the migration process. This strategy aims to optimize applications for the cloud environment, improving their scalability, performance, and efficiency. It can involve breaking down monolithic applications into microservices, adopting serverless computing, or re-engineering applications to be more modular. Move-and-improve is best suited for businesses that are able to invest in transforming their applications to achieve more long-term benefits. These can include cost savings, enhanced agility, and more innovative applications.
Cloud Migration Process
Migrating your on premise applications to the cloud enables businesses to capitalize on the cloud’s flexibility and innovation opportunities. By getting the process right, you can align your IT infrastructure with big picture strategic business goals.
While each company’s on premise to cloud migration will be unique, here’s a high-level overview of the steps you’ll need to take:
- Assess: Evaluate your current environment, including customizations and integrations, to understand the complexity of your migration and define your project scope.
- Choose: Select a cloud service provider that best fits the business requirements, based on factors like cost, scalability, security, and compliance.
- Design: Design the cloud architecture, including aspects like compute resources, storage, network resources, and security configurations required to support your application.
- Prepare: Plan the data migration approach, including data cleansing, mapping, and transfer methods, ensuring data integrity and security.
- Migrate: Migrate your applications, adapting or redeveloping customizations and extensions as needed to fit the cloud environment.
- Integrate: Build out integration with other cloud services, on-premises systems, and third-party applications, to maintain data flow and business processes.
- Test: Conduct thorough testing of the migrated applications and data in the cloud to verify functionality, performance, and security compliance.
- Go Live: Transition to the cloud environment, being sure to monitor and optimize your setup to fully leverage cloud capabilities.
- Train and Support: Provide training for staff on the new cloud environment and establish support channels for addressing future issues or enhancements.
This approach will ensure a smooth transition to the cloud, minimizing risks and maximizing the benefits of your on premise to cloud migration initiative.
Cloud Infrastructure Providers
For migrating on-premise apps to the cloud, many companies commonly consider the following service providers. Each is known for their robust infrastructure, scalability, and comprehensive set of services tailored to support complex enterprise applications:
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI): OCI offers a set of cloud services that are optimized for Oracle applications, providing seamless integration, high performance, and security. Oracle’s Autonomous Database and Exadata Cloud Service are especially beneficial, offering automated management, scalability, and high availability. For companies looking to migrate Oracle EBS to the cloud, OCI is often the first choice.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS is a popular choice for cloud migration due to its extensive global infrastructure, reliability, and scalability. AWS offers various services and tools that facilitate the migration and running of large workloads. These include options for virtual private clouds (VPC), elastic compute capacity (EC2), and relational database services (RDS).
- Microsoft Azure: Azure provides strong support for cloud migration, offering integrated cloud services that enable businesses to run their databases and enterprise applications efficiently in the cloud. For Oracle-based businesses, Azure’s partnership with Oracle enhances interoperability. This allows for a seamless connection between Azure services and Oracle Cloud applications and databases.
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP): GCP has been gaining traction for cloud migrations, providing highly scalable and secure cloud infrastructure. Google Cloud offers a variety of attractive solutions to enhance the performance and innovation of migrated environments. These include managed databases, as well as AI and machine learning capabilities.
Each of these cloud providers offer a range of services, tools, and support options designed to meet the needs of businesses migrating their on premise applications to the cloud. Your final selection will depend on your business requirements, pricing, and the technical specifics of the environment you are migrating.
Enterprise Migration. Tailored to Work.
Is your team ready to transform your enterprise applications with a seamless on-premise to cloud migration? At Traust, our expert solution architects are dedicated to supporting your efforts and ensuring the success of your initiative. And we tailor our work to meet your specific needs, employing strategies like “lift-and-shift,” re-platforming, and refactoring to optimize your migration and enhance your capabilities. Let us help you navigate the complexities and achieve a smooth transition with minimal disruption. Schedule a call with one of our experienced solution architects and take the first step towards a future-proof IT infrastructure.
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