Understanding Cloud Migration

What is a cloud migration?

A cloud migration is the process of moving digital assets, data, applications, and other IT resources from one storage environment to a cloud storage environment. Companies typically conduct cloud migrations to move from private, on-premises servers to cloud servers, but a cloud migration can also involve moving from one cloud provider to another.

Types of cloud migrations

• Migrating to a data center - Most cloud migrations involve moving directly to a data center, which is simply a cloud provider’s physical storage facility that houses servers to store data, workloads, and IT infrastructure.
• Hybrid cloud - Companies can also migrate to multiple types of storage environments, deploying what is known as a hybrid cloud strategy. A hybrid cloud is a type of cloud computing environment that combines elements of both private infrastructure and public clouds, such as using a combination of on-premises, private cloud, and third party public cloud services to manage company data, applications and workloads.
• Cloud to cloud - A cloud-to-cloud migration occurs when companies migrate data between different cloud service providers, or when moving from their private cloud to a public cloud.
• Application / database - During a cloud migration, both applications and databases are often migrated. A database is simply a collection of information, or data, that is stored digitally in a computer, on a server, or in the cloud. Applications (or apps) are essentially software packages that allow users to perform specific tasks on a computer or mobile device.

Cloud service models

When migrating to the cloud, companies should consider what type of cloud computing service model (also known as cloud service model) they will use when deploying the cloud for managing enterprise workloads. The most common cloud service models include IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

• IaaS - An infrastructure-as-a-service service model is when cloud provider(s) host the infrastructure components that provide compute, storage, networking and virtualization capabilities, which is essentially rented out to organizations who receive on-demand access to these capabilities via the internet. 
• PaaS - The platform-as-a-service service model is when a third party supplies the essential elements for software development, testing, execution and upkeep. The “platform” encompasses infrastructure, operating systems, middleware, development environments, and developer tools.
• SaaS - The most commonly recognized service model, software-as-a-service is a software licensing and distribution model where full-stack applications are cloud-hosted. The organization manages the applications and data, but the cloud provider manages the servers, storage, networking, and more.

Benefits of cloud migration

Companies continue to migrate their data and applications to the cloud because of the many benefits offered by cloud storage environments. When considering how to benefit from a cloud migration, it's important for companies to align their enterprise goals and processes with expected impact. Common benefits of a successful cloud migration include:

• Low point of entry cost - Migrating to the cloud is relatively inexpensive compared to purchasing new on-premises servers and similar infrastructure.
• Easy to manage - When infrastructure and/or data is cloud-hosted, organizations can avoid regular maintenance to on-premises hardware, servers and other computing equipment. There is no need for physical space, cooling equipment, electricity, and other resources. Instead, cloud service providers bear the burden of this upkeep.
• Infinite scalability - Scaling up or down is extremely easy and doesn’t require new hardware implementation for the organization.
• Remote work - Migrating to the cloud can improve an organization’s ability to provide computing resources or access to data to off-site employees.
• Security and compliance - Cybersecurity protections are built into cloud provider services and are designed to meet stringent cloud security and availability regulations and compliance requirements, including FERPA, HIPAA/HITECH, CJIS, GDPR, etc.

Ready to experience these benefits? Contact us today.

How cloud migration works

With proper planning, the cloud migration process is actually pretty straightforward:

1. Prepare - Establish your business objectives for the migration and assess your IT infrastructure to understand those resources. Consider building a business case for every application or workload to be migrated that compares current TCO (total cost of ownership) to the cloud TCO.
2. Plan accordingly - Identify specific workloads to migrate and frequency of data syncs required. The planning phase is also a great time to clean up your data to ensure you’re not paying to migrate information to be deleted afterwards. As well, identify how you’ll ensure data security and compliance both at rest and in transit.
3. Run the migration - Determine your method of migration, whether via public internet connection, public network + FTP, direct connection, or physical migration. Your method of migration can help you plan for any downtime, if at all, that your organization might experience.
4. Operate and test - After migration, continue to test, refine, and optimize your new cloud-based workloads based on performance metrics, or data security compliance needs. 

Cloud migration startegy

Carefully creating a cloud migration strategy that covers the entire migration process, from planning phases to post-migration optimization, is extremely important. This can all but ensure a smooth transfer of data, applications and workloads from your on-premises storage to the cloud. 

Plan

Establish KPIs: performance, capacity, compute, availability

• Establish a baseline for your application performance
• Identify application dependencies and inventory to understand the impact of the migration
• Prioritize migration order

Migrate

Establish KPIS: app error rates and response times, % of migrated infrastructure and apps

• Identify issues and roadblocks
• Validate cloud improvements
• Determine and conduct acceptance testing

Run

Establish KPIs: compute consumption, end-user QoS, instance and herd health

• Continuously monitor cloud services
• Cloud spend optimization
• Application refactoring
• Optimize end-user experience

Application-based strategy

An application-based strategy allows your team to estimate the impact of moving specific applications to the cloud on an app-by-app basis, a crucial step to maximizing app performance and extending IT capabilities. Consider moving smaller or low-risk applications first, while large, complex or business-critical apps can migrate later.

Initially created by Gartner, then later refined and extended by top cloud providers, the 5R Framework can help guide your application-based decisions by categorizing applications into one of the following action buckets:

• Retain - Keep on premises.
• Rehost - Lift and shift an application by attempting to recreate the current IT environment in the cloud.
• Replatform/remediate - Core architecture of the application remains unchanged, but with other cloud optimizations.
• Repurchase/replace - Moving to entirely new software or SaaS
• Refactor - Making significant changes to application code.
• Rearchitect - Redeveloping an app from the ground up.
• Retire - Retiring an app and moving any functionality to other apps.

Let’s see what cloud migration strategy is right for you. Contact us today.

Challenges of cloud migration

A cloud migration doesn’t come without its share of challenges, which typically includes maintaining data security and privacy, change management, potential vendor lock-in, system integrations, and hidden costs or unknown expenses.

As a global leader in cloud software, Nutanix has ready-made solutions for the most common cloud migration challenges like security, cost governance, and application mobility for cloud migrations.