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Cloud adoption has become an integral part of IT infrastructure optimization and business development in general. Migrating to the cloud enables companies to become more agile, more efficient, reduce administrative costs, and improve the customer experience.
Each organization has a different IT infrastructure, but it is usually a mix of public, private cloud, and traditional on-premises IT environments. In IDG’s Cloud Computing Survey, 73% of key CIOs said they have already implemented this combination of cloud technologies, with another 17% intending to do so soon.
What is cloud migration
Cloud migration is the transfer of digital business operations to the cloud with the help of mango tech. It involves moving data, applications, software, PCs, or infrastructure to the provider’s cloud. There are two types of migration:
- from physical infrastructure to cloud
- from one cloud platform to another (from another provider)
This process requires quite a lot of preparation, but it is usually worth the effort, leads to cost savings and more flexibility.
Why migrate to the cloud
Moving to the cloud will help you in different ways, depending on your specific business goals.
Renting a cloud server helps to improve overall business productivity. You get access to virtual IT resources – computing power, storage, communication channels – without capital expenditures and the need to maintain your own server room.
If you want to reduce the initial cost of your IT infrastructure, migrate your backups, disaster recovery, and file storage to the cloud.
To improve the productivity of employees’ workplaces, the virtual desktop rental service is suitable .
Migration to the cloud is necessary when an organization’s business applications need to scale beyond the capabilities of the on-premises datacenter, or if the existing on-premises infrastructure does not meet business needs due to obsolescence.
Cloud migration strategies
There are several different methodologies for bringing applications to the cloud, ranging from simply putting old applications “as is” to creating a new application that will be replaced from scratch.
Simple move (Lift-and-shift) is an approach in which the organization’s own applications do not change from their original versions, but are simply hosted in the cloud and not in the local data center. Lift-and-shift can include copying application executables, creating and configuring virtual machine (VM) images, creating security groups, configuring elastic IP addresses and DNS, and migrating to a new database in the cloud.
Refactoring . Assumes optimizing your application for the cloud. It is the orderly process of repurposing and re-coding application components. The result is a refactoring application that takes full advantage of the cloud architecture. This approach is especially useful for porting legacy applications. Despite lengthy preliminary preparation, refactoring is the most profitable method in terms of long-term business results and is more likely to provide a long-term return on investment.
Re-platforming is a mid-level migration approach that lies between lift-and-shift and refactoring. It implies some refinement of the systems architecture, for example, in the form of implementing a managed database or using dynamic scaling functionality. While this migration strategy will take longer than Lift-and-Shift, it allows an organization to take advantage of some of the benefits of a cloud infrastructure. For example, using autoscale for internal workloads can reduce the DevOps overhead of manually adding and reducing instances.
How migration to cloud-based virtual infrastructure works
Each organization has its own needs, and therefore the migration process will be slightly different, but usually it includes these basic steps:
Step 1 – Migrating Existing Data
The first step is to create an initial copy of the existing data in the cloud storage . This process will require choosing the right storage and then creating an initial copy of all of your data. At this stage, it is important to choose the right infrastructure for your organization. You can take a small set of data and transfer it to several different storage systems for comparison.
Keep in mind that copying the raw data is only one part of the initial migration. You need to validate the format and schema of the data you are exporting from your store, and then import the schema of the data into the cloud store before actually loading it.
Step 2 – configuring ongoing replication
After exporting the first local storage snapshot and copying it to the cloud storage, the next step is to set up the synchronization process. Ongoing replication is more complex than a single copy operation because it is actually a series of incremental copies.
Each operation requires registering changes to data and its schema, and applying those changes to the cloud.
Any timing solution should be tested for latency and reliability, as these parameters are critical to a successful cloud migration. You can build this synchronization yourself, or you can use the data pipelining service to handle continuous replication of data and schemas. Once this baseline is secured, you can move the rest of your infrastructure one by one. Read More How to fix Website scroll not working in Chrome Issue?
Step 3 – creating a security strategy
Implementing cloud infrastructure, albeit more technologically complex, is much easier than building its physical counterpart. But there is no need to rush – without a thorough analysis of the issues of how to protect your data , migration can bring new problems. Information security is one of the main reasons why some companies are not adopting the cloud. In the cloud, corporate assets are no longer behind a firewall, and the network perimeter does not essentially exist. Deployment of a cloud firewall or web application firewall may be required.