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Days are gone when you had to keep struggling with critical hardware maintenance and inability to handle heavy workloads in an IT environment.
The IT industry has progressed by leaps and bounds, and it’s all the Cloud Computing buzz around now!
Having understood the cloud ability and effectiveness, many organizations are increasingly adopting cloud approach and are strategically away from their legacy and on-premise infrastructure.
Thus, the need for an effective cloud migration strategy emerged to make all the complete legacy-to-cloud transformation successful.
Cloud migration Strategy is a planned initiative to migrate data and applications from legacy or on-premise infrastructure to a cloud environment.
A typical cloud migration strategy is composed of planning or preparedness to migrate, choosing appropriate cloud environment, data and apps migration and post-migration process.
These steps make up a perfect cloud migration strategy.
An effective cloud migration results in many business benefits such as minimized hosting costs, improved agility, business scalability, disaster recovery and enhanced security posture.
There are many other benefits that a cloud migration can offer. But the cloud migration success purely depends on the strategic roadmap designed for the cloud migration implementation process.
It’s important to remember that cloud-based infrastructure doesn’t work the same way for all types of workloads. Thus, it is very important to validate the procedure and strategy before moving ahead with the migration process.
Here are 6 cloud application migration strategies, otherwise called ‘6R’s, you may consider for your cloud migration implementation:
1. Rehosting
Rehosting is a kind of cloud migration strategy that involves the ‘lift and shift’ approach. In this approach, you directly lift your stack from an on-premise environment and host it directly on the cloud. This literally means you do a copy-paste of your entire environment without taking any risk of adding or removing extensive elements. But the problem here is this might not work for a long-term strategy though you get scope to make quick optimizations. This simply means redeploying your application into an IaaS architecture without adopting a complete cloud-native approach. This approach works well for a large legacy migration scenario where the organization looking for quick migration. With the quick migration, your applications will immediately be up and running providing you the room to think on future optimization.
2. Re-platforming
Also termed as ‘lift-tinker and shift’, this approach typically prepares your existing landscape to the next change coming in the form of cloud. Without changing the core architecture of your application, this approach allows you to make prior optimizations to achieve some desired benefits. In other way, re-platforming is a cloud migration strategy that merely helps you upgrade your application from its existing level with minimal changes. You can do so with the help of cloud provider’s infrastructure. This strategy works well for applications that make some value to the business, but not critical in nature. This can help businesses that are focused on building trust through enhanced system performance in the cloud world.
3. Re-purchasing
This cloud migration strategy is otherwise defined as a approach that drives ‘entirely to a different product’. Here, you get a chance to move your application entirely to a complete and new cloud-native environment like a SaaS platform. But in this process, the existing code gets completely replaced and the staff requires training on the new platform. This can be a cost-effective option if you have to move from a highly-customized legacy infrastructure. The process completely runs outside of your control and is handled by a third-party provider. This directly means your teams don’t have worry anymore about the updates and timely releases, as they are handled by the third-party. Different platform, different pricing model and handed-over maintenance makes up this strategy.
4. Refactoring
This is also called as Re-architecting approach. Here, application undergoes complete restructuring and re-developed by using cloud-native features. Thus, you get enough room to add more features, scale and other add-ons to meet the business demands, which would be a difficult task in the app’s existing or old architecture. If you are planning to move from a monolithic architecture to a service-oriented one, then this can work for you in terms of improving business agility and enhancing business continuity. Often considered as an expensive option, this approach can work your way if you have a strong command over the product-oriented business model. This helps you a lot if you are looking at a complete cloud approach, autoscaling or advanced cloud options like serverless computing.
5. Retiring
This strategy can also be termed as ‘get away with’ approach. After a complete assessment of your cloud readiness, you get a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t for your future cloud migration. This is where you can think about eliminating the unused apps to cut additional costs. This strategy helps you to divert your attention from unused or less-powered apps and tap the further potential of active apps. In other way, this strategy will also help your teams focus on critical business areas that require high attention.
6. Retaining
Also referred to as ‘revisit or retain’ approach, this strategy helps you retain some things that you don’t want to change. Often organizations, yet to realize the need for cloud adoption, tend to remain calm and may not prefer to migrate apps that have undergone upgrades recently. In such case, they prefer to postpone their cloud plans. Definitely, there is no mandate that you need to migrate everything to cloud. All you need to do is check what works the best for your business and migrate only that’s required. If you are in this stage, then don’t hurry up, reassess your environment to understand what is really demanding the cloud migration. Think strategic!
That could be any of these cloud migration strategies. All you need to think is if it really makes sense for your next business move. If not, you are in a wrong path. If yes, make a strategic move with the help of experts like us!
We understand the importance of approaching each work integrally and believe in the power of simple and easy communication.
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