Companies wishing to accelerate their digital transformation need to develop a strategy to move to the cloud and securely migrate their applications into this new environment.
Understanding your applications internally with your structure helps consolidate cloud-related decisions.
Before you start planning for cloud migration, you need to define your cloud strategy roadmap in order to create initial technical plans, ensure your workloads will run as planned, estimate migration costs, perform the migration with minimal impact to the business. And if you need more insights, you can click here for a cloud strategy roadmap.
Migration Analysis
This phase is the most important part of your move to the cloud because you need to understand your environment, infrastructure, application, security requirements, and governance to be able to decide if you are ready to proceed and evaluate the present and future costs associated to your project. All areas of the business should contribute to the analysis.
Cloud Migration Phases
In any digital transformation change within an organization, it’s important to understand what the destination is and what the waypoints will be throughout your journey to the cloud. There are many potential destinations for every application, and cloud computing deployments will be a mix of them.
Based on the TOGAF method, the migration to the cloud will include six phases:
1. Identification of the source architecture.
2. Identification of the target architecture.
3. Identification of cloud solution providers.
4. Selection of one or more cloud providers.
5. Migration plan.
6. Migration and testing.
Cloud Roadmap: Moving to the Cloud
Deployment methods for cloud computing
There are three different cloud deployment models. A cloud deployment model defines where your data is stored and how your customers interact with it (how they access it and where applications run). It also depends on your own infrastructure that you want or need to manage.
The public cloud is most commonly used because you have no local infrastructure to maintain or service: everything runs on your provider’s infrastructure. Companies can use multiple public cloud providers at different scales. Example of cloud providers: Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and more.
Approaches to migrate to the cloud
There are different methods that can be used to migrate applications to the cloud, here we talk about the 5Rs. The application can be:
– Re-hosted
– Refactored
– Re-architected
– Rebuilt
– Replaced
Is this a migration to the cloud or an adoption of the cloud?
This question is really important because before we talk about the cloud, every organization needs to understand that we need to change the way every employee works, thinking about automation, agility, DevOps, internal processes, legacy, security, data privacy and governance.
Basic steps to take before migration:
1. Form a cloud team and assign roles
2. Understand your infrastructure
3. Define coupling and links between applications and databases
4. Decide if applications can be moved without modification or offloading
5. Build a vision architecture project for selected applications
6. Start the experiment with the test provider’s offers
7. Prepare and plan for a change in roles within the organization after the migration
Multicloud Adoption
One of the solutions to prevent malicious and insider threats when using a hybrid cloud as a strategy is to use multicloud architecture, which may be suitable for some organizations, especially if your application is designed using microservices. This will be attractive for minimizing the latency of your deployed services and databases. In a more general way, if you want to stay ahead of the latest threats in cybersecurity you may also consider soc as a service from CPcyber.
Conclusion
Moving to the cloud is a change opportunity for every organization because it’s not about moving to the cloud, it’s about reorganizing work and implementing new processes, new challenges to achieve, and more revenue, scalability, resiliency and dependency awareness. Change will be easy and employees will focus on improving product development. Planning your strategy may take longer than expected, but it’s better than failing and reverting to on-premises architecture because, to date, modernization efforts have failed to generate the desired and expected benefits for some companies.
