A strong cloud migration strategy is key to scaling business capabilities and staying in line with digitization goals. This is when companies begin to migrate from on-premises systems to cloud technology. The cloud strategy will be driven by the vision, objectives and interests of the business, that is why there are no businesses with the same migration process. To carry out a successful migration to the cloud, we present a step-by-step process.
Consider Security Challenges in Cloud Migration
Cloud technology provides complete security for applications and services. Although the benefits of cloud migration are exciting, before the migration process, it is important to understand its challenges. Failure to consider those challenges can lead to serious problems.
Checklist to consider before migrating to the cloud:
- Data Blocks can be lost or erased. That is why data confidentiality must be ensured.
- Databases are usually encrypted, so consider the encryption and decryption aspects. If you don’t handle the data correctly, you can ruin it.
- Never use primitive tools or procedures to speed up the process. This could lead to depreciation of complements, loss of instances, and so on.
- Migrating to the cloud has several security challenges to consider. Therefore, to ensure that all security measures are met, prepare a security audit roadmap to ensure that migration teams adhere to security policies throughout the process.
Analysis of technical and business needs
It consists of determining the objectives of the migration and deciding the most appropriate method or strategy to migrate, according to different factors such as the purpose, deadlines and limitations.
Moving data to the cloud, or even changing cloud service providers, carries risks and benefits, so it is essential that the company is fully committed to the success of the migration process and prepared for the changes that may occur.
Resource planning and evaluation
A complete analysis of the IT environment will be carried out, that is, the current infrastructure and the applications used will be evaluated to determine the most appropriate migration strategy and thus prevent failures during or after migration.
In addition, it should be noted that there is the option to choose between three different types of cloud platforms: private, public and hybrid. There is also the option of evaluating the computing resources required through three cloud computing models: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).
In this step, it will be important to decide whether to carry out the migration while keeping the infrastructure as similar as possible to the original (lift and shift), or to make a better use of the process to refactor the applications in order to access the advantages offered by the cloud provider. This decision will depend on whether or not the timeframes and complexity will be significantly affected, among other factors.
Design and structure
The greatest amount of time is usually allocated. Before migrating an application to the cloud, it is necessary to design a migration plan to define the sequence of activities and resources used to carry out the migration and validation process of those applications.
It should be noted that it may be also necessary to work on the management of application resources to reduce their consumption and optimize costs.
Testing
This is the most important stage of migration. Despite preparing an elaborate plan, problems and risks cannot be completely eliminated, so it is vitally important to test and ensure that the applications work in the cloud environment without any hassle.
Pilot tests help to verify if services and applications work, and therefore, if they can be migrated to the cloud without problems. Test results also help to identify the problems and risks of migration, thoroughly verifying the entire process that will take place.
Migration
If the pilots are successful, data and application migration can be performed. The final phase involves the use of the necessary tools to accelerate and automate the process, for example the use of infrastructure as code.
Monitoring
Once the migration has been successfully completed, it is important to implement infrastructure monitoring to help identify and solve any problems that may arise in the new environment, as well as to apply an alert system that reports the most serious problems at all times.
It should be taken into account that these stages of migration may be different depending on the type of migration. Similarly, the stages also differ from one cloud platform to another. For this reason, it is important to have an expert partner in cloud infrastructure and development. The Nubiral team has extensive experience in different areas, working with DevOps methodology and guaranteeing the 100% adaptation to their clients’ infrastructures and technologies.
—————
By Rossana Suarez, DevOps Engineer Nubiral