Cloud Migration – The Need of the Hour

Why businesses are moving to the cloud

Cloud computing has revolutionized how businesses store, access and manage their critical data and applications. With cloud services becoming mainstream, businesses across sectors are realizing the strategic and financial benefits of cloud migration. Some key reasons why businesses are looking to move their IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud include:

Scalability and flexibility: The cloud provides almost unlimited scalability allowing businesses to scale up or down their infrastructure as per business requirements. With cloud, businesses don’t need to make large upfront investments in hardware and can pay only for the resources they consume. This gives businesses more flexibility.

Cost optimization: Migrating to cloud brings significant operational cost savings. Businesses avoid expensive on-premise hardware and software costs and shift to an OpEx model with pay-as-you-go cloud pricing. Other cost benefits include reduced power, cooling and maintenance costs for physical data centers.

Increased collaboration and mobility: Cloud delivers easy access to data and applications from anywhere enabling a more distributed and mobile workforce. Employees can securely access business systems using any internet-enabled device. This improves collaboration and productivity.

Business continuity and disaster recovery: Cloud services provide high availability and built-in redundancy which helps ensure business continuity even during disasters or outages. Cloud auto-scales infrastructure during spikes in usage or failures to keep business systems up and running.

Focus on core business: With cloud, IT becomes a utility enabling organizations to focus resources on their core business competencies rather than data center maintenance. Cloud service providers manage infrastructure, software, security issues providing a reliable platform for innovation.

Faster innovation: Cloud platforms provide advanced services and capabilities as code libraries that businesses can leverage to build and deploy new applications quickly. This accelerates business innovation and time-to-market for new products and services.

Keeping pace with technology: Constant upgrades in cloud platforms keep businesses ahead of the technology curve without upfront investments. Businesses can adopt latest technologies like machine learning, IoT, analytics through cloud services.

With these compelling benefits, more and more businesses across industries are making a strategic shift to cloud-based IT operations through cloud migration programs.

Types of cloud migration

When moving to the cloud, there are generally two broad approaches to migration – lift and shift or re-architecting.

Lift and shift: This involves directly porting or transferring existing on-premise virtual machines, servers, applications etc. to the cloud infrastructure with minimal changes to the existing architecture. This is usually the quickest approach but may not fully utilize cloud capabilities or optimize for cloud-native development.

Re-architecting: This requires redesigning applications and infrastructure to take advantage of cloud-native features like serverless computing, microservices, data storage, security etc. The applications are broken into modular components and migrated. While complex, re-architecting leads to a cloud-optimized environment offering better scalability, performance and resilience.

Businesses also choose from public, private or hybrid cloud models based on their unique requirements around data security, compliance, application portfolios etc. For mission-critical or sensitive workloads, a private or hybrid cloud is preferred over public cloud.

A well-planned cloud migration approach considers business and technical objectives to determine the right methods, cloud environment and migration strategies.

Cloud migration challenges

While moving to cloud promises extensive benefits, it is a complex process requiring careful planning and execution. Some common technical, organizational and cultural roadblocks that businesses face include:

Interoperability issues: Ensuring applications and data can smoothly operate in the new cloud environment without compatibility conflicts. Managing application dependencies across platforms.

Resource constraints: Staff and talent limitations for managing cloud migrations in addition to day-to-day operations. Lack of in-house cloud expertise.

Security concerns: Protecting confidential data and workloads in shared cloud infrastructure against threats. Meeting compliance regulations.

Vendor lock-in risks: Dependency on a single cloud provider increases migration costs if platform needs to change. Standardization across providers required.

Change management: Overcoming organizational inertia and driving cultural changes to embrace cloud ways of working. User readiness and adoption challenges.

Migration backlogs: Prioritizing huge application portfolios and data volumes to migrate. Managing blackouts due to concurrent migrations.

Integration complexities: Ensuring seamless interactions of migrated systems with on-premise or other cloud systems. Inter-cloud migrations complexities.

Testing rigor: Establishing robust testing practices to validate ported workloads at scale and across regions before production migrations.

Cost management: Precise forecasting of ongoing cloud costs post migration versus on-premises. Optimization across providers to avoid bill shocks.

These challenges underscore the need for comprehensive cloud migration strategies, best practices, expert services and tooling to make large-scale transitions smooth and successful.

Global Cloud Migration Service

To address these migration challenges, leading service providers offer end-to-end Global Cloud Migration Services  that deliver:

– Detailed cloud readiness assessment consulting for migrating applications and infrastructure.

– Multi-cloud connectivity and integration mapping. Consulting on the right cloud operating model – public, private or hybrid.

– Custom cloud migration strategies and roadmaps factoring business, technical and compliance needs.

– Cloud cost optimization services for cost forecasting, modeling and ongoing management.

– Application re-engineering and refactoring services as needed for optimum cloud-native design.

– Managed migration of data, VMs including DR drill validations using industry-standard tools.

– Post-migration validation, performance testing and productivity testing services.

– 24/7 support from experts throughout the migration lifecycle.

– Trainings and workshops on cloud management, operations, security best practices.

With global delivery capabilities, these managed services address multi-region and mutli-cloud transformation programs with significant benefits:

– Reduced risks of failures and downtime through best practices and expert oversight.

– Faster time-to-cloud through scale expertise, standardized frameworks and automation.

– Measurable ROI through optimized cloud operating models and ongoing cost management.

– Staff augmentation for projects requiring surge resources or niche cloud skills.

– Single point of accountability for mission-critical migrations through managed services.

In summary, partnering with experienced Global Cloud Migration Services providers de-risks large scale cloud journeys through tested methodologies, global 24/7 support and delivery excellence. This helps businesses maximize cloud value faster while focusing internal teams on

Note:
1. Source: Coherent Market Insights, Public sources, Desk research
2. We have leveraged AI tools to mine information and compile it