Best Practices for cloud migration

 

In an age of choice and flexibility, multi-cloud is the norm today rather than the exception. Most enterprises today want to avoid vendor lock in, and want to choose different cloud platforms for different workloads. A study conducted by IDC of 300 enterprise IT leaders revealed that 93.2% of respondents were using ‘multiple infrastructure clouds’ for their business operations.

While having greater choice is a clear necessity, it also throws up multiple challenges for organizations. Any organization that underestimates the complexity of multi-cloud migration will fail to realize the full potential of a multi-cloud strategy. Being aware of the potential hurdles can help enterprises to tap into the numerous business benefits of a multi-cloud environment. Hence, before planning any cloud migration, it is critical to clearly define the pre-migration and post-migration stage, and document the existing IT ecosystem consisting of apps, databases, networks and interdependencies.

We recommend some of the following best practices for ensuring seamless multi-cloud migration

Define what to migrate

 

Before you decide to migrate applications or data to a cloud platform from on-premise or from another cloud, it is critical to first identify a list of applications that must be migrated. This can be done on the basis of performance gain, economics of maintaining the application or security, after migration to the new cloud environment. Enterprises hence must invest enough time to maintain an inventory of applications so that there is minimum risk of any missing dependency during a migration process.

Decide the type of migration

Once the inventory of applications is prepared, enterprises must decide the type of cloud environment they want to migrate – will be it be an all public cloud environment, will be it a private cloud or will be it a hybrid cloud environment? Depending on the benefits, you could decide to migrate to the cloud environment that your organization need. The migration must be planned in such a way that it is less disruptive with very less downtime.

Prepare and test

The new cloud environment where your applications and data will migrate needs to be ready to receive data in a format that is required by the cloud provider. You could start small, and move migrating applications gradually, as you gain greater confidence in the new cloud environment. It is also equally important to test if your on-premise applications with their data and dependencies will work properly in the new environment. Factors such as latency, performance and additional bandwidth also need to be considered as migration to the cloud can affect end users.

Monitor and measure 

Post migration, organizations must implement tools that can help them get complete visibility into the performance of every application. This can be done by correlating the performance of every application by mapping the user journeys across different platforms such as web or mobile. Post migration, organizations must check if all the application interdependencies and linkages are working perfectly, and also check if performance levels have improved or reduced, due to migration. You could also use cloud-native monitoring tools that provide application-level insights and monitoring on the cloud environment.

Enforce security

Most of the breaches that have occurred on public cloud platforms are due to user mis-configurations. Other issues include unencrypted databases, weak network controls and poor governance. Hence, post migration, enterprises must ensure that all applications must ideally have the same level of security across on-premise apps or apps in the cloud environment.

Lastly, if your organization lacks the capability or has less bandwidth to carry out cloud migration activities, you could consider outsourcing this activity to a specialist and certified cloud service provider. For ensuring that you get the best out of your cloud migration, you must consider service providers that can not only guide your organization in choosing the best possible cloud platform, but also help your organization ensure effortless provisioning, monitoring and management via a single dashboard.