Digital services, advancement in IT infrastructure, and moving away from traditional practices of archiving has led to a shift towards ‘cloud migration’. With time and technology businesses are taking a leap and investing in clouds to take the benefit of cloud migration services, which in long run is beneficial for keeping a stock of all the important information at one place in a safe and secured manner. Cloud migration requires a detailed strategy and an action plan in line with business insights for the effective shift. Some of the key strategies for cloud migration include:
Rehost (Lift and Shift):
As the name implies, it’s the basic cloud migration strategy wherein an application can be migrated to the cloud by making some alterations. This strategy is chosen by the companies who are new to the cloud, and they get cost-saving benefits as the platform avoids the need for staff training, maintenance, office space, etc. It is associated with moving in premises server to virtual machines (VM) or cloud platform, by shifting the current server to IaaS (Infrastructure as a service).
Replatforming:
It implies making a few changes or adjustments by optimizing the application to achieve key benefits through cloud migration. This strategy also includes some modern updates such as automation to ensure the application runs as per the latest changes or upgrades. It is best for the companies who are considering adopting the cloud to extract the benefit of improved system performance. This may lead to rapid changes (both positive and negative) in company resources and efficiency in handling cloud-based applications.
It involves application rebuilding from scratch. Companies using this strategy deal in specific applications which can be added to the existing platform without hampering the usual operation of the platform. The companies using this strategy run their application on PaaS (Platform as a service) which works as a platform and also drives the need to provide mandatory skill sets to its resources for future consideration.
Revise:
It involves moderate rewriting the code for the application, and then migrating to the cloud either through Rehost or Refactor. It is important and beneficial to modify and adapt the application to ensure it is operating in the desired manner before it is migrated to the cloud. This strategy requires planning, skills, and knowledge of using either IaaS or PaaS and reaping the benefits from them.
Replace:
It is also called Repurchase which involves the complete migration of the application to a new or another product and replacing the existing services on a new platform. This may create a challenge of losing the existing code, and additional requirement of training the staff on the new skills for the new platform. This requires profound observation of the application which has to be migrated but are not complicated when using the new platform. This strategy just envisages migration to an already build in SaaS (Software as a service) platform which is provided by a third-party vendor.
Wrapping up:
Cloud migration is an effective IT solution for business, not only it provides an array of feasible options for information storage, server, access, etc. but also supports the existing system without hampering the ongoing operations. Due to its features and comprehensiveness, it has been accepted across all industry lines and forms one of the most important operating units in any organisation. Cloud has been recognized as one of the biggest achievements and inventions of digitalised world.
Also read: Why Cloud Migration is Important?