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.

Now CloudEndure Migration Is Accessible At Zero Cost

CloudEndure Migration clarifies, accelerate, and lowers the price of cloud migration by providing an extremely automated lift-and-shift solution. CloudEndure Migration can utilize to rapidly rehost a great amount of machines to AWS without stressing about compatibility, performance disruption, or long cutover windows. An agent-based solution, you can move any applications and databases which execute on supported versions of Windows and Linux OS with CloudEndure Migration. Now CloudEndure provides CloudEndure Migration to relocate applications from any physical, virtual, or cloud-based infrastructure to AWS without any price. This feature is accessible to every AWS customers and partners. You can use CloudEndure Migration to move your applications to any public AWS Region and GovCloud. To begin, register for free CloudEndure Migration licenses. Each free license enables for 90 days of use following agent installation. Throughout this span, you can copy your source machines, run boundless tests, and execute a scheduled cutover to finish your relocation. During free usage of CloudEndure Migration, you will be charged for any AWS infrastructure that is provisioned while relocation and after cutover, like compute (EC2) and storage (EBS) resources. Go through CloudEndure Migration product page or technical documentation to get more information.

AWS SMS Supports For Migrating VMs Operating in Microsoft Azure

AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) is an agentless service which makes it simpler and swifter for you to move thousands of on-premises workloads to AWS. AWS SMS permits you to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes, making it simpler for you to collaborate extensive server migrations. Now AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) gives assistance for relocating virtual machines (VMs) working in Microsoft Azure to the AWS cloud. This new potential makes it simple for you to move current applications working in Microsoft Azure to the AWS cloud to use benefit of greater reliability, faster performance, more security capabilities, and lower costs. Previously, customers could move VMs working in VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Now, customers can utilize the clarity and facilitate of Server Migration Service to move VMs working in Microsoft Azure. You can discover Azure VMs, sort them into applications, and relocate the application group in one unit avoiding the difficulty of cooperating the copy of discrete servers or separating application dependencies. AWS SMS notably lessens the time to move applications and decreases the risk of errors in the moving process. To know further, click AWS SMS and for technical information, click documentation.

Amazon ADS announced Data Exploration to design your Migration

Amazon Application Discovery Service (ADS) aid organization customers to design relocation of their projects by collecting data related to their on-premises data centers. Data migration requires ample of workloads which are frequently dependent. This Data Migration technique includes two vital steps that are Server Utilization Data and Dependency Mapping. ADS gathers and shows behavior data, usage and configuration from your servers that assists you grasp your workloads. Application Discovery Service ADS data exploration permits you to simply query data that Application Discovery Service agents can drag from your on-premises servers in single location which gives you a chance to gauge and plan for relocation project. Gathered data from all agents will be saved in Amazon S3 bucket and data will be updated automatically when you starts the Data Exploration option from Migration Hub Console.

To learn more about the Data Exploration feature, go here.

Bring Your Own IP for Amazon VPC

Now Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) permits you to take your own publicly-routable IP address prefixes to AWS and broadcast on Internet. For the use of AWS resources like EC2 instances, NAT Gateways and Network Load Balancers, you need to generate Elastic IP addresses from your Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) address prefix. Both IP addresses, Elastic IP address generated from BYOIP address prefix and from Amazon works precisely identical. You can reduce your downtime during relocation by concurrently broadcasting your IP address prefix from AWS and withdrawing it from the current location and this can be done with the command on broadcasting your BYOIP address prefixes.

You can migrate applications to AWS without needing your partners and customers to change their IP address whitelists only if you are using trusted IP address which is whitelisted in the firewalls of your partners and customers. BYOIP permits you to relocate such applications to AWS with least interruptions.

BYOIP is beneficial for applications such as commercial email services that depends on IP address status to permit traffic from your endpoints to reach intended receiver. Some legacy applications have hard-coded IP address dependencies.

BYOIP feature do not need any extra charges and also you don’t have to spend extra charge for Elastic IP addresses that you generate from BYOIP address prefixes. BYOIP feature is now publicly accessible in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions. For further details related to Bring Your Own IP – BYOIP refer this Documentation.

Leverage Managed Services for your Business

Cloud.in is an AWS Consulting Partner and AWS Channel Reseller Partner with a skilled, experienced team of professionals who strive to grow your business.Our team provides best services for your business, be it in any industry vertical. With extensive experience since past years and right set of skills we help clients achieve their goals.

Our approach and framework makes your journey through the Cloud simple without any pitfalls. We ensure Business Continuity and management of your workloads in a smooth manner, ramping up your growth. We adhere to values that are designed to ensure that we put your needs first, and we always aim to deliver superior customer experience.

As a Managed AWS Services Provider for you Cloud infrastructure we act as an extension to your existing system admin team. As a part of managed services we have been engaging with our customers to provide standard end-to-end solutions adhering to AWS Best practices.

Some of our significant benefits include : 

• Continued Support - 24/7 NOC
• Disaster Recovery Management
• Backups 
• Proactive Monitoring

With our extensive experience in the industry, We have been driving innovation and helping customers transform their business model. We value you and so your investment, we aim to provide you most optimised solutions. With our Consolidated billing model, you can always have discounted and tiered pricing in place. All you pain areas are well assessed and taken care of by our team of experts. We tend to make your journey smooth and concise.

We Help you move to AWSome Cloud.

To make us your companion in your Journey, Contact us @ www.cloud.in

Move to the Cloud to increase performance of the Business and save Cost

Cloud has been an attractive idea since last few years. But people hosting on premise or in data centers since ages are reluctant to shift to cloud just with the “name”.

We have been helping customers in various roles including Company Directors, COO’s, IT heads, Developers from a variety of verticals and industries to make a smooth shift, removing the hesitation and help grow their business.

Moving to cloud, doesn't literally mean just doing a lift and shit. The traditional architecture designed is as per the on premise/data centre procurement. There is a lot more to be thought of when moving to CLOUD.

Let’s have a look at one of the biggest consideration people have, the obvious one!

“Cost Consideration”

Total cost of Ownership would represent the entire operating cost for a solution, and is essential component of a business case.

When we consider cost, there could be two types of elements involved in the total cost of ownership :

1. Tangible elements
2. Non-Tangible elements
   
   
   Tangible Elements

   

   But wait, are these the only factors for consideration ?
   Yes there are, pure apples-to-apples comparisons of machines and infrastructure with on-premise environment is not the solution.The focus should not just be on pricing always, it should include non tangible elements also.
   
   
   
   
   Non Tangible Elements
   
   
   

   With each on premise or data centre setup and infrastructure there are many factors involved. The infrastructure cost obviously eliminates but along with the power, cooling, insurance, real estate cost as well as maintenance of hardware and software. Since there Shared responsibility Model in place, lot of administrative tasks at the customer end are eliminated.
   
   
   A few more Add-ons :
   • Reserved Capacity Pricing
   • Spot Pricing
   • AWS tiered Pricing
   • Cost Benefits of Automation
   Is there something more ?
   Yes there is …
   • Cost of disappointed or lost customer
   • Quick and easy procurement
   • Cost of excess unused Capacity on shelf
   • Cost of resource shortfall
   • Business value increase in time

   Conclusion :

   Never just consider Tangible costs for complete TCO analysis before making decisions on Cloud adoption, it does come up with other intangible cost considerations !!
3. To make your cloud adoption journey smooth, Visit us at www.cloud.in