Cloud Migration: Benefits, Risks, and Strategy

According to the report by Flexera, 31% of companies would choose the public cloud, while nearly 28% would prefer hybrid cloud solutions. But what causes businesses to transfer their IT processes to the cloud? There are multiple advantages that organizations from diverse industries can enjoy.

More Scalability

Essentially, the cloud allows you to eliminate the barriers of extending your IT resources or withdrawing them according to your current demand. Thanks to the cloud’s full scalability, businesses can easily adapt their requirements for specific services. This is what business executives cannot afford to do with local IT infrastructure.

Reduced Overall Costs

The recent report from OpsRamp states that almost half of the respondents saw the cost reductions for IT services by 30-50% thanks to the exploiting cloud computing services. Put in simple words, those who adopt cloud can only purchase the services they use. Instead of keeping cost-consuming hardware, data centers, and staff, the cloud adopters take advantage of saving money and scaling their computing power on demand.

Easier & Faster Implementation

From a growth perspective, cloud migration opens limitless opportunities for businesses. First of all, you get access to a broad assortment of tech to implement quickly and cost-effectively. You can integrate edge cloud solutions anytime the specific business demand occurs.

Higher Security Levels

Cloud is a secure and safe place to move your IT workloads. Cloud providers usually update and upgrade their services according to the latest industry standards, while complying with all regulations. This significantly reduces the risk of cyberattacks, leaving customer companies more than satisfied.

Every company has a specific IT environment with inherent risks, issues, and drawbacks. We have picked the most common difficulties associated with cloud migration, which may help you prevent or overcome some of them while moving your workloads to the cloud.

• When moving internal apps with confidential data to the public cloud, you will be limited in managing it due to the compliance requirements of cloud vendors.
• Rethink your migration intentions, if your current IT infrastructure matches your business goals, doesn’t need much management, scaling, and the end-users are satisfied.
• With the use of patented technologies, one won’t be having a legal opportunity to transfer them to the cloud.
• The work of your apps might be affected by additional latency which is a common pitfall of cloud solutions across the internet.
• Normally the design and architecture of customer’s resources are customized, which makes it tricky to fit them into public cloud architecture. Thus, it may require some modifications before migrating them to the cloud.

Once business executives decide to move their data sets to the cloud, they have to choose the suitable cloud computing model. These are the most popular models based on the type of service.

The IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) model is a perfect fit for companies that dedicate their applications for hosting within third-party data centers. Such companies outsource the data storage and servers along with their maintenance. However, by 2022 the lack of IaaS expertise can cause delays in 50% of IT companies in their cloud migration efforts by two years or more.

The PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) model is beneficial in terms of backend management. The developers purchase everything they need to create an application, from development tools, OS, to infrastructure by a cloud vendor.

SaaS (Software as a Service) are full-featured applications entirely hosted in the cloud and completely managed by a cloud provider. Such cloud-based solutions typically are automated and easy to use. Compared to a PaaS customer who literally buys all heavy equipment to build a house, a SaaS customer buys the entire house.

According to your needs and security preferences, you can choose one of the following deployment models:

• Private cloud is a cloud environment, where a customer runs their IT infrastructure solely. Imagine you want to buy a house, not an apartment in the skyscraper. So the private cloud is an entire building, which belongs only to you.

It provides more security than any other type of cloud but is a costly solution. It can be either on-premises of a customer or within a vendor’s organization. Anyway, you get full control over your private cloud.

• Unlike the private cloud, public cloud infrastructure is completely managed by a company-provider. You can rent the resources required, but won’t be able to control them. Back to our house, it’s like you rent a room or several ones in a big house, just like other customers can do with the rest space in this building.

The benefit is that the public cloud is an affordable and flexible solution for running software. Public clouds are the best fit for companies with a limited budget.

• Hybrid cloud is a network of two mentioned earlier clouds aimed at meeting the sophisticated requirements of a customer. For example, you can keep your sensitive data in the private cloud, while managing less valuable apps and data in public hosting.

Although hybrid is a cost-effective approach for majority organizations, it’s quite tricky to realize. The integration between private and public clouds needs deep expertise and much time. Anyway, going to the cloud is a top priority for most businesses. According to Gartner, in the next two years, cloud migration across big enterprise IT markets will reach 28%.

Why Hybrid Cloud Is Attractive To Companies

Hybrid cloud can be beneficial thanks to their flexibility and affordability. The benefits of a public-private combination may include:

• On-demand reliability
• Dynamic scalability
• High availability
• Solid security measures
• Reduced operational expenses

In a real-life example, you may host an application in public environment to scale up when the demand is on the peak. You can withdraw resources in case the popularity of the app declined. Private cloud comes into play when you need to store your critical data securely. In such a way, a customer can exploit hybrid cloud services effectively.

In the recent report, we see more than 80% of firms exploiting multi-cloud services, where almost 60% of companies plan to use hybrid solutions. Moreover, Gartner says, the multi-cloud strategies will make two-third of organizations independent from cloud companies in the next four years.

Relocating all your business components from local servers to the cloud requires thorough preparation, including defining goals and results, timeline, forecasting challenges, and more. You have to determine what resources you want to transfer and which to leave within your organization. Find out specific applications for the migrating workloads. These may be the following:

• Critical enterprise programs
• Backups and data recovery
• Software engineering projects
• Collaboration software

During the creation of a migration strategy, a company needs to measure all possible risks, define the budget, provide edge security measures, choose the cloud type.

Generally, a cloud vendor provides an in-depth plan of relocation specifically designed to meet your business requirements. This ensures a seamless migration and prevents company systems from downtimes throughout the transferring.

Plans for successful migration usually include roadmaps, schedules, project metrics, instruments, and services. In addition, it might incorporate the communication strategy for all shareholders, from a company customer to a cloud provider.

To make relocation comfortable, take advantage of this checklist. It can help to keep the business processes on track. A list can be used as a basic version or be extended by migration managers if they decide to do it.

• Define the budget required for migration and find a suitable cloud provider.
• Consult with a vendor to decide whether you need multi-cloud solutions.
• Group workloads by different characteristics like complexity or size.
• Build a team for cloud migration, as responsible managers may the critical factor for success.
• Accurately discuss all goals with the team and set KPIs.
• Prioritize the resources to be moved, schedule the migration activities followed by detailed roadmaps.
• Communicate to all participants what to await during and after the relocation.
• Make sure you’ve got the security plan ready for migration and after migration.
• Keep track of implementations to make changes if needed.

Ensure that your team is trained professionally to move resources to a new cloud environment. This guarantees that your organization will stay productive during a challenging transition, and even after this big shift.

The legacy IT workloads may hamper your business from development. Cloud can give you more scalability and functionality to grow. Fortunately, cloud migrations are not tricky too much with the right strategy and cloud provider in place, you can move the chosen business components to the cloud seamlessly.

If you are considering moving application(s) to the cloud and would like further guidance, please get in touch with us and we will find the best solution for you. Innovecs possesses deep expertise in many industries, including Big Data, BI, Blockchain, VR, Machine Learning and Data Intelligence, and more. So we are always ready to help you get rid of pains and get more gains with the top-notch tech solutions.