Migrating Applications to the Cloud
Many executives and business leaders are overwhelmed at the thought of moving their organization’s enterprise applications to the cloud. It can feel like a cumbersome task, given that there are so many important factors to think about. Feeling like the cloud isn’t a safe, secure place for your critical data?
The truth is, due to the emergence of such powerful new cloud management tools, organizations can harden their security while keeping complete control of their cloud environments. In fact, 94% of organizations already use some form of cloud application to run their day to day business. Employees are using online collaborative tools and for most organizations, they’ve already stopped moving off-site backups with tapes and disc,s and have moved into some sort of cloud backup solution. If you’re already benefiting from cloud services, why not leverage the cloud for your enterprise applications as well?
HostedBizz’s team of engineers specializes in cloud migration planning. The methodology that our engineers use is similar to that of the traditional data center move.
Strategic Alignment
Planning a seamless migration takes careful planning. In this phase, it’s important to document the leading drivers of your migration, as well as assess TCO and ROI goals of the transformation. What are your end state goals and business requirements? It’s important to work with an experienced cloud provider that can create a solid migration plan that will provide you with a prioritized timeline of events and targets to build your migration strategy.
Whether your cloud migration is P2C (Physical-to-Cloud), V2C (Virtual-to-Cloud), and C2C (Cloud-to-Cloud), it’s important that all business units and resources are carefully considered.
Key considerations when moving applications to the cloud:
- What is a reasonable TCO and ROI expectation for this migration?
- How can I fully prepare my team as well as our technology environment for this transformation?
- Which of my applications are cloud-ready?
- Which applications need to be updated in order to move to the cloud?
Enhanced Discovery
You’re not only moving applications to the cloud, but ensuring that they are optimized during this transformation. This means that mapping all of your applications, IT assets and all of the interdependent technologies must happen in this phase. Taking into account your unique business case considerations and collaborating with infrastructure owners and business units across the entire organization is key to a successful migration plan.
Analysis
Now that the discovery phase is complete, it’s time to determine the hard and soft inter-dependencies between your applications, databases, servers network etc. Knowing this will allow you to group and move assets accordingly, mitigating the risk of causing connectivity issues during migration.
Another key consideration when migrating applications to the cloud involves a detailed analysis of the required application dispositions. Once these are known, there are six potential cloud migration options for your applications; Rehost, Replatform, Repurchase, Refactor, Retain, and Retire. These are also known as the 6R’s of application migration.
Design and Planning
At this stage, your migration team has likely put together an in depth collection of information regarding your assets and environments. Now it’s time to start structuring your migration strategy into a detailed design and plan to execute against. There are a few key questions that you must ask during the design and planning process:
- Are all of the necessary vendors prepared for migration?
- Is your migration team using automated tools, or are they manually moving servers?
- Has there been an in depth assessment of people, process and technology involved
Most well architected cloud infrastructures are designed are built upon five common pillars; reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and operational efficiency.
Execution
The key to successful migration lies within the ability to mitigate downtime experienced by your business units, as well as any disruptions to operational integrity. This means waiting until after business hours to work on any heavily used databases. In addition to this, testing the target environment should be done at this time. Before moving any applications to the cloud, ensure that all licenses are up to date and can be utilized within the new environment. Any issues that arise must be addressed before the migration is executed. Run tests on the workloads to ensure performance capabilities so that there are no issues after going live.
About HostedBizz
We design best-in-class solutions and help migrate your business onto our enterprise-grade cloud while you focus on the activities integral to your business success. Our customized services address your requirements for reliability, security, performance, scalability and flexibility. We help customers see ROI from their Cloud investment. Contact us today to find out how we can assist you in moving to the cloud.