Cloud computing has indeed unleashed a massive wave of productivity enhancements across diverse industrial realms—a fact that you most probably know already.
So, can you just dive in to adopt the best-in-class cloud solution available? Just like that? The answer is - A big no. Although moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud may seem like a bold and wise step, it is crucial to consider some key points before you actually hop into the technology. This will help avoid all possible pitfalls that may come in your way.
To make your cloud migration planning and execution hassle-free, we have formulated a short yet comprehensive checklist that might come handy.
1. Understand the 5 R's of Cloud Migration:
Initially, before you even start the migration process, knowing the various cloud migration options is important.
- Rehosting - This involves deploying your existing applications in a different hardware environment without impacting the architecture.
- Refactoring - This means executing your applications on a third-party infrastructure.
- Revising - This gives you the freedom to modify the applications as per your fluctuating needs—on a third-party infrastructure of course.
- Rebuilding - Adding flexibility to cloud migration, this option allows you to rebuild your applications by discarding the existing ones.
- Replacing - This option is almost similar to rebuilding, except the fact that you can replace a single application or a cluster of applications with commercial applications.
2. Know Your Applications
Understanding how your business-critical applications work is always the key to success. This will help you draw the overall performance metrics of your applications. Moreover, to a considerable extent, it will also help you predict how they will work in a cloud environment. If you manage to get through this initial step, expect some skyrocketing performance metrics—when your applications start functioning on the cloud.
3. Be Good at Predicting Your Application’s Performance
Now that you know all about how your applications work, put all your efforts in formulating a detailed current performance profile. Moving further, analyze this profile and project the performance of each application’s compute and storage resources—considering multiple “what if” scenarios.
4. Consider Cost Optimization Early
To make your cloud journey profitable and reliable in every aspect, you need to plan your budget and keep your priorities straight—prior to migration. This means identifying the applications that are not business-critical and costs more on the cloud than on-premises—driving cost optimization effectively.
Moreover, you can use the money saved to educate your employees about their new cloud environment!
5. Implement a Disaster Recovery Plan
A successful cloud application migration involves - harnessing the ability to manage disasters in the most innovative way. This is exactly where automation plays a vital role—killing hazardous cloud instances on the go, and creating new ones.
6. Look Out for Migration Tools
Watch out for the most trusted and best-of-breed migration tools available in the marketplace. Talking about industry trusted tools, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) serves as an all-inclusive solution for application migration.
We know, migrating applications can sometimes become a massive hurdle. But, no matter how complex or confusing the entire process may seem, if you do it right, you can reap the numerous benefits that the cloud has to offer.
Originally published , updated September 04 2021
