Moving to the cloud has become a necessity for many companies, but the task is hardly easy. What is the best cloud migration strategy for your business, and what are the key factors affecting the successful outcome? Read on to find out!
Cloud is evolving at a rapid pace, with all segments experiencing spending growth. According to 2023 figures, infrastructure-as-service is leading the market with a projected 30.9% rise, followed by platform-as-a-service (PaaS) expected to grow at 24.1%. According to O’Reilly’s Cloud Adoption report, over 90% of companies use the cloud in one way or another, and very few are considering moving to on-premises.
Organizations are embracing the cloud along with other cutting-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain, to leverage synergy for maximum value. Those who hesitate risk missing out on growth opportunities and falling behind the competition.
While giving up on the cloud is not an option for most businesses, moving there without a plan is even worse. Successful transition requires a structured approach, detailed cost assessment, partnering with the right cloud vendors, strong security focus, testing, and following other good practices.
Many organizations shy away from large-scale migration due to their anxieties about outcomes. This is especially true with companies struggling with data disarray and fearing that moving to the new environment will worsen things.
The good news is that a well-developed strategy and professional guidance from experienced partners can immensely reduce the risk of flaws. Expertly performed migration can put your company on the right track for many years, allowing you to profit from the flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness of the cloud and gain a competitive edge.
Moving to the cloud is not about jumping on the tech bandwagon or even making use of the cloud’s separate advantages. Successful cloud migration is a strategic leap that can turbocharge your business with the synergy of features it provides. Let’s look into key advantages the cloud environment can bring to your business.
The cloud infrastructure lets you scale your resources up or down to match your needs and support increased workloads much more quickly than on-premises gear. With cloud services, you can say goodbye to pricey hardware that is of little use during quiet periods and pay only for what you actually use. You can also save on software licenses necessary to scale up your businesses in traditional environments and legacy systems.
Cloud-native technologies will keep your business afloat and even speed it up without breaking the bank. By doing away with hefty hardware expenses, you can channel your resources towards innovation and growth. With predictable operational costs and no worries about maintaining inconvenient on-premises equipment, you’ll experience much less pressure on your budget.
Cloud platforms not only streamline your business operations, but they also serve as a launchpad for your business ideas. With access to a number of cutting-edge solutions, you can pioneer new products, services, and business models.
The cloud transforms your business into a well-connected global community. Your team can work together from different corners of the world, sharing data, insights, and strategies. Cloud-based tools such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 facilitate brainstorming and idea organization among team members and external stakeholders. Figma or InVision enable designing and refining user interfaces via the cloud. AWS and Azure are fast lanes for creating, evaluating, and launching prototypes with ease – and the list goes on.
By migrating to the cloud, you level up in terms of IT security. Cloud environments allow businesses to leverage advanced security measures to protect their applications, sensitive data, and intellectual property. With robust encryption protocols, regular security audits, real-time monitoring, automated threat detection, and multi-factor authentication in place, you can enjoy peace of mind regarding the security of your operations.
Additionally, the centralized nature of cloud systems enhances the ability to implement consistent security policies and updates across your organization, ensuring a unified strategy against cyber threats.
Cloud capabilities are unparalleled when it comes to disaster recovery. By transferring critical data and applications to the cloud, you establish an off-site repository that remains immune to physical disruptions. This shift enables fast and seamless recovery in case of a system failure or other adverse event. With cloud resources supporting your business, data can be accessed and restored from anywhere.
Cloud providers often offer automated backup solutions and redundancy, ensuring data integrity and availability even in critical situations. Moreover, cloud scalability allows you to speed up disaster recovery efforts by quickly allocating necessary resources and mitigating downtime. Overall, the cloud enables you to minimize disruption and ensure business continuity.
The cloud migration process is ripe with challenges. However, risks shouldn’t discourage you from taking the right step. With a comprehensive cloud migration plan and professional guidance, you can smoothly move from on-premises infrastructure and achieve your business objectives in a new scalable environment. Below are the common cloud migration challenges to consider when developing a cloud migration strategy.
While cloud providers offer robust security measures, the shared responsibility model places a portion of the security burden on businesses. During migration, data can be exposed to potential vulnerabilities if not handled correctly. Issues such as data breaches, unauthorized access, and data leakage can arise if proper encryption and access controls are not in place.
Additionally, compliance with data protection regulations becomes more complex when data crosses geographical boundaries. To address this challenge, remember to apply stringent data security and privacy standards, thorough risk assessment, encryption protocols, regular security audits, and adherence to compliance regulations.
Moving large volumes of data is fraught with the risk of glitches, inaccuracies, and unforeseen errors. Inaccurate data mapping, network disruptions, and incompatible data formats can lead to partial or complete loss of critical information. Ensuring data integrity during the cloud migration process is essential. To avoid failures, focus on meticulous planning, robust backup strategies, thorough validation procedures, and regular testing and validation at each stage of the migration process. Such an approach will allow you to identify and correct potential errors before they can affect your business.
Migrating to the cloud infrastructure can lead to unexpected bottlenecks, latency, and reduced application response times. Reconfiguration of systems and altering data pathways increase the potential for performance hitches that can negatively impact user experience and operational efficiency. To avoid trouble and address potential performance gaps, apply meticulous pre-migration testing, load balancing, and resource optimization. Keep an eye on performance after migration and be quick to address any issues to ensure scalability, responsiveness, and quality.
Cost savings are a key advantage of cloud adoption. Still, you need an elaborate cloud migration strategy and top-notch cost management to avoid straining your budget. Inadequate planning and ill-informed resource allocation decisions can lead to unexpected expenditures, affecting business results. When migrating applications and data to the cloud, costs can escalate due to factors such as misconfigured resources, unoptimized workloads, and unnoticed idle instances.
To mitigate this risk, perform a comprehensive cost analysis before moving from existing infrastructure to a cloud-native environment. Remember to include projected usage, data storage, network bandwidth, and any additional services. Also, make use of cloud pricing calculators and implement stringent budget controls to prevent unwelcome financial surprises.
Vendor lock-in is a major concern when moving to the cloud. While moving to the cloud offers flexibility, reliance on proprietary tools and services from a specific cloud provider can limit future adaptability. As a result, companies may find themselves tied too tightly to a particular vendor’s ecosystem, making it difficult to switch to an alternative service, for example, a new cloud-based infrastructure, or transition back to on-premises solutions.
To avoid hassle and excessive costs, consider designing a cloud migration strategy under the guidance of an experienced partner. The optimal cloud model should allow for interoperability and portability across multiple cloud platforms. Employing standardized interfaces and open-source technologies can also help decrease the risk of vendor lock-in.
In 2010, Gartner, a global research and advisory firm, published a 5 Rs framework for successful cloud migration. The model comprises five migration strategies that help businesses simplify the process and mitigate the risk related to moving their environment to the cloud. Building on Gartner’s outline, Amazon added its own perspective on the cloud migration strategy, further developing the original framework. The combined rules are as follows.
The rehosting strategy involves migrating applications and workloads to the cloud with minimal modifications. Rehosting aims to replicate the existing environment in the cloud without altering the application’s architecture or codebase. The lift and shift approach works well for companies seeking fast cloud migration options since it preserves existing investments, allows to avoid extensive redevelopment, and doesn’t affect security and compliance properties.
The downside of rehosting is the limited ability to leverage cloud-native capabilities for cost optimization and achieving business objectives in the long run. Other disadvantages include potential latency and performance issues or migration failure risk related to incorrect mapping of application requirements to cloud configuration.
Refactoring focuses on optimizing existing applications for the cloud environment. This strategy involves rearchitecting the code so that the system fits in with cloud platform requirements. Refactoring allows you to take full advantage of cloud-native features, including more efficient resource use for cost optimization, which translates to long-term savings.
Rearchitecting is advised for businesses driven by a strong need to add new features, enhance performance, and rapidly scale – objectives hard to achieve in existing infrastructure. Refactoring allows organizations to modernize their applications and leverage the benefits of the cloud, providing them with increased resilience. The drawbacks include the time, skills, and costs it takes to perform the migration, as this model is much more demanding than mere rehosting.
Replatforming is a cloud migration strategy that aims to strike a balance between swift transition and optimizing for cloud computing. This approach involves selective adjustments to applications, allowing them to take advantage of cloud-native services and features while retaining their fundamental functionalities. By optimizing code and architecture, businesses can enhance performance, scalability, and efficiency without undergoing a complete application overhaul.
Replatforming is a convenient option for companies interested in benefiting from the cloud environment without resorting to radical and potentially expensive strategies. Advantages include cost efficiency, low migration effort, and access to cloud features. The main downside is so-called scope creep – uncontrolled growth of work scope that may require adopting the refactoring approach.
As the name suggests, the rebuilding cloud migration strategy includes rebuilding applications from scratch with cloud-native services, architectures, and best practices. Reimagining applications within the new environment may require scrapping most of the existing code. For this and other reasons, it is costly, but at the same time, it allows companies to create cloud-compliant systems and fully utilize the cloud’s benefits, such as scalability, flexibility, resilience, and agility, which may prove worthwhile in the long run.
The rebuilding strategy is the way to go for organizations aiming to pioneer new business models based on cutting-edge technologies. The key downside is investment costs. The big plus is a fresh start in a new environment without the technological debt.
The replacing strategy involves phasing out an existing application. Retiring is an option when the system’s capabilities are no longer useful or provide insufficient business results. According to Amazon research, up to 20% of an enterprise IT portfolio can easily be turned off due to a lack of profitability. Retiring can yield significant savings that can be put to use for advancing cloud migration strategy. Instead of maintaining resource-intensive, outdated systems, businesses can focus on perfecting their cloud migration initiative and transitioning to a desired cloud infrastructure.
The retention approach, Amazon’s input to the cloud migration strategies framework, essentially boils down to postponing migration and revisiting the priorities. The retention strategy doesn’t necessarily apply to the whole IT environment. It may include a portion of your portfolio if, for some reason, you’re not ready to move it to the cloud and prefer to keep it on-premises. The so-called hybrid or part migration strategy makes perfect sense if it is well-aligned with your business goals and fits into long-term planning.
Inventing a good cloud migration strategy is never easy. It involves sorting out tons of technical and business issues to deliver the best immediate and long-term results. Making yourself cozy in the cloud requires a vision, a good dose of planning, and choosing technologies that best suit your business goals. One of the most appealing options to consider for building robust cloud systems is Go or Golang – an open-source programming language created by Google to address the challenges faced in large-scale systems.
Golang has grown to become a powerful contender in the field of developing efficient, scalable, and resilient cloud applications. Its key advantages include simplicity, performance, concurrency, fast garbage collection, internet-focused design, and more. When paired with the microservices architecture, Golang is a formidable tool for crafting cloud apps that take full advantage of cloud scalability, agility, and resource efficiency.
The language’s native support for concurrency enables developers to efficiently manage multiple tasks and requests concurrently – a vital feature in cloud applications handling numerous users and data streams simultaneously. With a fast compiler, Golang ensures high-speed compilation, increasing performance. Golang’s approach to error handling also counts among its strengths, encouraging explicit checks and promoting code that is more robust and reliable for cloud environments.
At GoSolve.io, we have extensive experience in performing cloud migrations for large and small companies from various industries. We also possess high-level expertise in Go/Golang, with a proven track record of completed Go-based projects.
Our cloud migration teams can help you with cloud readiness assessment, deciding on a cloud migration approach, choosing the right cloud provider and migration tools, and crafting a successful migration strategy for your business.
If you need any assistance related to moving your applications or whole IT environment to the cloud, feel free to contact us at your convenience.
Golang (or Go in short) is a breath of fresh air in the coding market. A long-needed shakeup in the stale programming market with a cute gopher as a mascot. Its development was started in 2007 by designers Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson.
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