Cloud Migration
Cloud migration is the process of moving applications, data, and workloads from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud environment. However, it can also refer to a migration from one cloud provider to another.
The three leading public cloud service providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
The objective of a cloud migration is for organisations to take advantage of the benefits offered by the cloud. Some of the major benefits are elasticity, flexibility, digital agility, and cost efficiency, alongside access to a wide range of managed services, which contributes to significant reductions in total cost of ownership (TCO).
Cloud migration can take various forms, depending on the organisation’s goals, existing infrastructure, and the complexity of the applications being moved. Common types of cloud migration include; rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, recoding and retiring.
Rehost
Also known as Lift & Shift. Rehosting involves the moving of applications from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud without changing the architecture.
Replatform
Entails minimal modifications to apps enabling them to take advantage of specific cloud services or features. This often utilises managed services for compute, databases & storage.
Refactor | Rearchitect
Involves significant changes to the applications codebase to align with cloud native principles. Often makes use of technologies such as, containerisation & serverless.
Revise | Recode
This is the substantial revision and modification of an app’s codebase in order to accommodate new programming languages or frameworks while preserving functionality. This often occurs alongside rearchitecting.
Retire | Retain | Replace
Some apps are retained & flagged for retirement. Others are replaced with SaaS alternatives, or if the app serves a critical purpose, it may be revised and/or rearchitected.
Also known as Lift & Shift. Rehosting involves the moving of applications from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud without changing the architecture.
Entails minimal modifications to apps enabling them to take advantage of specific cloud services or features. This often utilises managed services for compute, databases & storage.
Refactor | Rearchitect
Involves significant changes to the applications codebase to align to cloud native principles. Often makes use of technologies such as, containerisation & serverless.
This is the substantial revision and modification of an app’s codebase in order to accommodate new programming languages or frameworks, while preserving functionality. This often occurs alongside rearchitecting.
Some apps are retained & flagged for retirement. Others are replaced with SaaS alternatives, or if the app serves a critical purpose it may be revised and/or rearchitected.
Benefits of Cloud Migration
Elasticity
Cloud services provide the ability to scale computing resources up or down based on demand. This flexibility allows businesses to handle varying workloads and accommodate growth, which delivers an extremely cost effective method of hosting based on compute utilisation. Congruently, companies no longer require substantial upfront investments in hardware.
Security
Cloud providers invest heavily in security measures to protect data and applications. They have dedicated security teams operating at a global scale. These teams are augmented by AI detection for malicious behaviour, they adhere to industry best practices as well as compliance standards. Due to the security models inherent in cloud platforms, data loss and ransomware attack risk planes are significantly muted. Moreover, these cloud providers also deliver a substantial array of security appliances and support all industry leading vendors.
Agility & Speed
The cloud enables rapid deployment of applications as well as services, reducing the time it takes to bring new products and features to market. Development teams can quickly provision resources as well as experiment with new ideas, fostering an innovation and responsiveness culture.
Global Reach
Cloud providers have data centres located across the world. This allows organisations to deploy applications closer to their target audience, reducing latency and providing a better user experience for customers located in different regions. This also provides multiple points of redundancy, allowing for extremely high levels of resilience.
Reliability & High Availability
Cloud providers offer robust infrastructure with redundancy and failover mechanisms, ensuring high availability and minimal downtime. Many cloud services provide Service Level Agreements (SLAs), guaranteeing an uptime of 99% or 99.9% at entry levels.
Cost Efficiency
Cloud computing offers a pay-as-you-go model, where organisations only pay for the resources they consume. This eliminates the need for large capital expenditures on hardware and infrastructure, making it a cost effective option for businesses.
Ease of Management
Cloud services offer centralised management consoles and automation tools, simplifying the provisioning, monitoring, and management of resources. This streamlines IT operations and reduces the burden on IT teams, in turn reducing the TCO of operations.
Data Backup & Disaster Recovery
Cloud providers offer built-in data backup and disaster recovery options. This ensures that critical data is protected and can be quickly recovered in case of any unexpected incidents. Furthermore, infrastructure can be redeployed and backups restored in a fraction of the time of on-premise estates.
Innovation & Advanced Services
Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings and rapid deployment capabilities allow engineering teams to innovate faster without the dependency on operations. Organisations leveraging these services stay ahead of the competition and drive innovation.
Environmental Impact
Cloud computing is more environmentally friendly compared to traditional on-premises data centres. Cloud providers use energy-efficient infrastructure and invest significantly in renewable energy, often with zero carbon footprints. Moreover, cloud data centres comply with stringent international standards regarding sustainability, reducing overall energy consumption.
Moving to the Cloud
As part of the planning process, it is important to understand the organisation’s on-premise infrastructure. As such, cloud readiness assessments and cataloguing the existing estate prior to migration is crucial.
Once a business’s on-premises estate has been documented, the next step is to decide what needs to be migrated and how to move each asset to the cloud environment. This is why a cloud strategy aligned with business objectives is so integral. The cloud strategy surfaces the roadmap and outlines the migration approach for each aspect of the on-premise environment, including the applications. Moreover, the cloud strategy defines the business’s desired end state while providing motivations for the architectural and deployment choices made, such as if the business will have a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud or single cloud estate.
Cloud Remediation
In this instance, our cloud remediation service refers to the remediation of problematic cloud estates. This can take the form of inefficiency, high costs and/or resilience. There are various principles, practices and processes that need to be adhered to in order to configure a cloud environment that delivers the benefits of cloud noted above. Our team of experienced architects (applying the principles of the Well-Architected Framework) are on hand to remediate cloud estates, build landing zones and ensure effective, efficient and governed cloud environments. All our cloud environments take security far left, deliver zero trust and resilient architectures with DevOps pipelines built in from the start.
Taking a comprehensive approach to cloud architectures enables organisational agility in a digital landscape. An integrated and iterative stance on cloud infrastructure and cloud native applications ensures businesses successfully achieve their strategic cloud adoption goals. Resulting in robust and efficient cloud architectural design alongside the implementation of agile and efficient software development processes and deployment practices.
All environments, remediations included, require cloud assessments in order to begin optimising the cloud estate. Similarly to cloud migrations, a remediation cloud strategy redefines application needs within the cloud, once again following the R’s of migration listed earlier.