A Cloud migration strategy is the plan an organization prepares to move it's On-Premises data and applications to the cloud. Without the right strategy any organization won't be able to achieve the desired cloud benefits.
I think one should keep in mind the three fundamentals before adopting cloud -
1. Why you’re moving it
It's important for an organization to be clear on the purpose of the migration and set goals accordingly.
2. What you’re moving
Once you decide on why you're moving to cloud, you need to focus on what you're going to move.
3. How you’re going to do it
This includes noting interdependencies, prioritizing what you'll migrate first, figuring out applications which can be moved as they are, which ones will need some reworking and what tools are you going to use to make cloud migration simple.
Cloud Migration Strategies
There are six most common approaches broadly known as the 6 R's of migration as below -
1. Rehosting - Also known as "lift-and-shift"
You can think of it as "the same thing, but on the cloud". As the name implies this involves lifting your applications, tools, data and shifting it from on-premises hosting to the cloud with little effort. Rehosting is popular for initial migrations because it involves migration of exact copy of your current environment into an IaaS solution without making any changes. Rehosting may lead companies to re-architecting in the future, once a cloud-based operation is in place.
2. Replatforming - lift, tinker, and shift
Replatforming involves making few adjustments to optimize your landscape for cloud to achieve some benefits, but you're not changing the core architecture of the application. Instead the applications are emulated through a virtual machine so that the legacy IT system can become compatible with the cloud technologies.
3. Repurchasing - Moving to a different product
Repurchasing involves moving your applications to a new Cloud Native product most commonly a SaaS platform. With repurchasing, the major challenge is training your team on a new platform.
4. Refactoring / Re-architecting -
Refactoring involves rebuilding your applications from scratch. This is usually driven by a strong business need to add features, scale or performance that would be difficult to achieve in existing environment. Refactoring is generally the most expensive option, but, if you have a good product-market fit, it can also be the most beneficial.
5. Retiring - Get rid of
Once you have assessed your application portfolio for cloud readiness, you might find some applications are no longer useful. In such a case you can simply turn them off and save on power, maintenance, etc.
6. Retain - Revisit
Some organization are unable to take all of their data off premises for multiple reasons. In such a case, they should migrate only what makes sense for the business and plan to revisit cloud computing at a later date.
The information technology landscape continues to change rapidly and moving to the cloud has proven significant benefits over running a datacenters in a traditional way. With a proper planning and choosing appropriate cloud an organization can take advantages of most of the cloud features.
Thank you for reading!
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