Embarking on a Cloud Migration Journey

As “cloud” becomes the buzzword in the digital space, organizations need to first understand the importance and outcome of embarking on a cloud journey – to have and to hold onto this journey, during thick and thin times. As challenging as it may seem and get, a wholesome migration to cloud will only be achievable if one understands the value-add it has to offer – the need for a cultural shift to embrace this journey, seamlessly. Before delving into its value-add, let’s look at the common steps that a cloud migration journey entails and the need to avail cloud migration services.

Cloud Migration Steps

Hopping onto a cloud migration journey is not an overnight thought. It requires comprehensive effort and planning as a start. A general practice of steps that is followed by organization entails –

• Planning – As the first step, assessing one’s own cloud strategy and penning a blueprint becomes a prerogative. As the planning phase, it requires an end-to-end thought on analyzing the strategy, identifying the right tools, technologies and QA partner, accounting for the costs involved, analyzing the environment, etc. It includes discovering the options for efficient mapping, network configurations, risk assessment, etc.
• Design – In this step, engineers essentially map out the application and infrastructure design as a pre-preparation for the next step on migration. Analyzing and planning the migration steps and shifting the setup from on-premise to cloud, this step helps pave the way for migration.
• Migrate  – Post planning, discovery, analysis and design, cloud migration is finally taken up. This journey can be a custom strategy which may include various types of migration. These may include a lift and shift model (shifting the on-premise infrastructure to cloud as it is), lift and optimize model (by adopting new infrastructure and updation of softwares), drop and shop model (altering the proprietary application and shifting a new one), re-architect model (re-engineering the infrastructure or application logic), hybrid model (using the infrastructure interchangeably by duplicating it), or the retire model (dissolving or decommissioning the components that are not needed by replacing them with the new functionalities). This is a pivotal step and requires coherent effort from an organizational standpoint – the need for a cloud migration services partner arises which can help organizations partake in this journey.
• Validate  – This step essentially involves testing and validating the migration phase – including testing of functional as well as non-functional attributes, be it performance or security. Validating the migration setup on cloud becomes an important step to ensure that the infrastructure or application is intact and functions as expected. End-to-end testing and Quality Assurance become imperative steps herein.
• Operate and Optimize – This step involves handling and mitigating the operational components by optimizing resources. Saving on costs, time and additional resources, the last step in the journey involves an end-to-end optimization process.

These are a generic set of steps that organizations can undertake for their cloud migration journey – this necessarily isn’t limited to just one model or the given number of steps (can be merged or altered as per organizations’ strategy). With these steps in mind, let’s look at how migrating to the cloud can add a lot of value to organizations’ being as a whole.

Value-add with Cloud Migration

Cloud migration services offer immense value-add to organizations which can make their infrastructure much more scalable and expedient than an on-premise environment. Moving to the cloud with cohesive components such as DevOps and security, can help organizations make their stay even more wholesome. DevOps essentially helps amalgamate development with IT operations – and with cloud in picture, DevOps-driven automation frameworks and infrastructure help in expediting processes. Cloud security also becomes an important variable that needs to be taken into consideration – be it DevSecOps, security testing and assessment on cloud, or following some of the best practices.

With cloud migration services, scalability, efficiency, optimization of resources, security, flexibility, etc., become key value-adds – helping organizations make their journey worthwhile and seamless. Cloud migration has become the need of the hour – an imperative activity for organizations to enhance and scale their business. The need for cloud migration goes beyond – to not just accelerate digital transformation but also create a secure and scalable infrastructure environment for organizations. Thus, embarking on a cloud migration journey becomes the first step to truly achieve digital transformation and scalability.