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.

Journey Through Cloud With AWS

Introduction to AWS
AWS is a company which provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals their customers. This company provides you with cloud services where you can store your data securely and access it later through the internet. They provide a set of primitive abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks, tools and help their clients build applications with increased scalability, flexibility and reliability.

AWS Feature
AWS provides their clients with a wide variety of services which help them experience an amazing cloud journey. They offer a set of cloud-based products including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, management tools, IoT, security. They help businesses grow faster, lower IT costs, and scale. AWS can be very beneficial to companies with heavy workloads by helping them in setting up an online database and securing all their data on these databases.

• Data Lake and Analytics
AWS provides the most comprehensive set of services to build your data lake analytics solution, to move, store and analyse your data. Import your data from on-premises in no time on highly secure data lake with a capacity of storage to exabytes. Analytics services provided by AWS helps in analysing the data with the broadest selection of services, through which we can predict future outcomes, and prescribe actions for rapid response.


• Compute
Compute is the most basic step of building an organisation, whether you are building an enterprise, cloud-native or mobile-based applications. Compute service provided by AWS allows you to develop, deploy, run and scale your applications and workloads. AWS is working to be the compute platform at a global level, and are investing to support any workload and business need.


• Databases
AWS offers 15 different purpose-built database engines, from which one can choose according to the needs of their workloads and business. They provide relational databases which are 3-5 times faster than other alternatives, in which you can scale your database’s compute and storage resources easily. AWS offers cluster monitoring to keep your workloads up to focus on higher-value application development.


• Management Tools
AWS management services give their client the ability to innovate faster and maintain control over their costs simultaneously. AWS offers to manage and govern AWS as well as non-AWS resources. Clients have the freedom to enable, provision and operate their environment for both business agility and governance control, and the end to end operational efficiency is provided by AWS.


• Internet of Things
AWS IoT services provide local data collection and analysis, and it is the only service provider to provide data management along with rich analytics. AWS provides services for all layers of security which include preventative security mechanisms, encryption and access control to device data. AWS IoT is built on secure cloud infrastructure and integrates with services through which we can build complete solutions.


• Networking and Content Delivery
AWS provides the most secure set of networking services, with essential security features by isolating resources and encrypting data. AWS delivers the highest network availability with 3 times fewer network downtime from networking issues when compared to other service providers. It delivers customer applications and content anywhere over a private network with consistent high performance.


• Security
Securing the data and workloads is the most important feature of AWS cloud, it provides services to protect your data and workloads from unauthorised access. Encryption, key management and threat detection continuously monitor and protect your accounts and data. AWS provides you with the feature create rules based on which the access is filtered to protect your web applications. AWS continuously monitors the network activity and account behaviour on your cloud environment to detect any kinds of threat and secures your application usage.

Conclusion
AWS is a company that provides a highly secured cloud computing and database to its customers. Securing your data into AWS clouds comes with a wide range of services, which are continuously monitored to provide you with a threat free cloud environment. AWS provides management tools to easily manage all your business data and workloads, which also helps in growing your business faster, lowering your IT costs both at the same time. It provides 3 times faster services when compared with other service providers, and helps their client build applications with higher flexibility and reliability.