Most of the organizations are adopting cloud computing technology but the biggest challenge which they are facing today is cloud migration. You must be familiar with the advantages of cloud computing and due to benefits like agility, cost efficiency, and scalability, many enterprises are migrating their data and applications to the cloud.
But before taking the risk of downtime and unavailability, there are many points to be considered. Moving data to a completely different environment outside the firewall and into the cloud is no small feat.
Organizations purchase cloud services in order to achieve cost savings and research say that 45% of 2015 IT budgets are going towards off-premise systems. With a recent survey, 30% of the participants are completely satisfied with the cloud migration experience.
You must be familiar with the seven-step model of cloud migration which explains step by step method to shift your services and applications to the cloud environment. Cloud migration typically requires in-depth sales pitch to cover the cost, security, governance and some other considerations.
To know which migration strategy will be suited for your business, you can read the article oncloud migration strategy for a small and large business.
The advantages ofmigrating to the cloud can be many and after understanding thegoals of migration lets try to understand some of the cloud migration checklists.
Cloud Migration Considerations Checklist
We will be trying to cover every task which should be on your checklist starting with most important considerations.
Cost Evaluation
While most of the organization consider migrating to cloud to be cost-effective. Well this is true for most of the businesses and many small enterprises are benefited eventually but it’s not the only one factor which should be considered.
Migrating application to cloud reduces hardware and IT staffing expenses. Mobile applications running on the cloud gives a greater Return on Investment (ROI) as the demand for application keeps on increasing and decreasing and it is easily handled as services running on the cloud is scalable.
Some applications that are legacy enterprise hardware like Oracle database applications might be much expensive if considered running on the cloud. There are also additional costs like networking cost and bandwidth costs but this can be minimized after complete planning and implement the right strategy.
Cost evaluation is one of the most important tasks to be considered in cloud migration checklist as after migrating your system must be scalable and has a good Return on Investment. There are many cost estimation tools available on the internet such as AWS, CloudWatch, Pricing Calculator and Microsoft Azure. But the accuracy of these applications is always an issue.
Cloud to Cloud Migration Challenges
Migration to the cloud is not just migrating one premise to the cloud, it can also be migrating from one cloud to another. This can be shifting your data and application from one service provider to another or shifting from public cloud to private cloud.
Moving from one service provider to another can be due to various reasons like security issues, scalability issues or any technical problems. Moving from public cloud to private cloud is to protect your confidential data from access by everyone. There are many third-party tools such as Accenture and Racemi that will be handling all your migration process at a moderate price.
Cloud to Cloud migration is quite a difficult process and require much labor. For this enterprise test their applications and all other necessary configurations first on cloud and this comes under the testing phase of cloud migration framework. The configurations can be for virtual machines, networks, operating systems and much more.
Choose Appropriate Cloud Flavor
You must have considered various precautions and cost considerations before migrating but choosing a right cloud environment is just as important as other considerations. All three public, private and hybrid clouds have individual benefits. Selecting appropriate type of cloud is an important step in the cloud migration path.
Public clouds are highly scalable and work on a pay per use model. Public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Google, provide a large number of features but also have a flaw. They generally lack control and multi-tenancy and due to this, many highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services are the poor fit for the public cloud.
The private cloud on other hand offers more control in an on-premise environment. The management part falls into organization hands and in this, the users are individually responsible for security and performance monitoring.
Hybrid Cloud is best of all three as it offers the best of both the clouds. In other words, a mixture of both public and private cloud. There can also be minor performance issues but these are always lesser than other two types of cloud.
Defining Cloud Migration Strategy
Considering checklist for cloud migration, your strategy for migration must be appropriate. Once after considering your data, cost, challenges, and security, it’s important to come up with a best and proper migration plan for your business or company.
One aspect which must also be considered while planning is what will be done with the leftover on-premise technology. An organization needs to determine the timeframes for data and applications. It will be great risk and challenge if you are considering to shift all at once. You can start migration by breaking it into workloads and shifting only those applications first that are less critical and your system would work without that.
You can also read our article oncloud migration strategy to know which strategy would be best for your business whether it is small or big.
Hybrid Cloud Migration Checklist
You must have read some of the most important points to consider in your cloud migration checklist and here are some of the other points to be considered for your hybrid cloud migration checklist.
- Can you use the cloud to open new markets?
- This may include where exactly you can reduce the cost of sales and create new markets with legacy applications?
- What are the applications which can be served online for reaching new customers?
- Accessing security requirements to understand implications?
- Is your data accessible on public internet or you have a secure connection for that?
- How your data is transmitted? Is it a secure channel or not?
- For a secure connection, assess your need for persistent VPN and private VPN.
- Plan your migration to minimize impact or downtime.
- Go for enterprise-grade cloud provider for meeting performance and security requirements.
Cloud Database Migration Checklist
If you are looking for cloud database migration, here are some points to be considered before migrating your database. It is not just a one day task as there are many vendors that are providing attractive cloud offerings with high security and you need to know what exactly to look for.
Why do a database migration?
- The ability to manage big database in-house is not appropriate and is inadequate.
- It’s also not a central functional unit
- For your disaster recovery backup, moving to the cloud can be the best option
- If you are working on new applications and want to try cloud as a testing environment.
The advantages of cloud database migration and cloud server migration are many but some of the key benefits are availability, scalability, reliability and low cost. As the system of a cloud is stable and scalable with not much investment needed.
Most of the businesses are often more comfortable with their database migration as all the security concerns are addressed satisfactorily. It’s a difficult task to accomplish as the application will be residing at our home and database runs on the external server. There can be many security issues and data encryption is the most important aspect to be considered.
Here are some of the top checklists to be considered if you are thinking about database migration.
- Accessing the size of the database
- Confidentiality of data must be first
- Testing of the application must be done earlier before migrating database
- Scalability should be ensured. If it is not, there is no sense of shifting your confidential data
- Eliminating garbage will definitely affect the overall cost
- SLAs should be designed appropriately