In the year 2021, we are generating data higher than any previous year. Organizations are moving to Cloud to store a large amount of data and faster processing. Migration to Cloud comes with the cost benefits, ease to scale, high availability, automatic software upgrade, hardware maintenance, and reduced computation time.
After understanding the benefits of the Cloud, you might think to migrate your legacy infrastructure and application to the Cloud. You can enjoy the advantages only when you consider migration challenges and processes. Cloud migration ride may be time-consuming and bumpy if you do not understand below.
Define your business use case for migrating to Cloud
You can list down your reasons for migrating to Cloud. For example –
- A company might be tired of maintaining and upgrading third-party software like email and want to leverage Cloud’s SaaS (Software as a Service) services. It will also free your staff to focus on your core business.
- A Company may want to reduce the cost of building and maintaining hardware in their own data centers. Cloud’s IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) helps in running applications on the latest hardware. You can pay based on your usage.
- An eCommerce application may need to scale your application to handle changing user traffic. You can scale up in peak traffic hours and can pay extra only for those hours. Similarly, a Financial company may need extra compute capability on month end, quarter end, or yearend.
- The analytics department of a company may want to collect more customer information and predict based on defined models. It will require high data storage and computation power.
Check your application readiness for the Cloud Migration
You should access your application and create a blueprint for faster transformation. You may need to make your application code cloud compatible, to harness the benefits of its computing power and scalability feature. Moving your monolithic application to Microservice-based architecture will give you a head start.
Hybrid Compatibility
Many financial institutes do not want to put their data on the Cloud for security reasons. It means they want to host data on their centers whereas moving their application code to Cloud. In this case, you should think of securing the data transfer mechanism and compatibility of your data storage hardware and software.
Cost implication assessment
You should assess your cost benefits. If you have recently invested in the hardware, then for you, it does not make sense to move on to the Cloud. However, if you are going to replace your hardware or procuring additional hardware, then by using cloud infrastructure, you may save on upfront cost and pay only for what you use. You can also consider the cost of making your application cloud compatible. Identify a way to implement DevOps and measure the ROI of this activity.
Data storage location
Your organization is responsible for securing client information and its data. Cloud is a distributed infrastructure across the world. So you need to choose and know the location of your data. It will help you with data security and regulatory requirements.
As shown above, Cloud migration is not just moving your existing application and data from in-house IT infrastructure to Cloud. It is about the opportunity to re-architect your application and data for future growth.
