How to establish a reliable cloud migration strategy in 2019
Migrating an organization's in-house IT infrastructure to the cloud is the most important decision many enterprises make. However, little progress has been made towards that end. The key point that people need to understand is that the entire migration process will become the most important work of the organization's IT staff.
The migration process starts with collecting data related to existing infrastructure, environment, and applications. Next, organizations need to use a series of analysis methods in different dimensions, such as network connectivity, workload architecture, operating costs, feasibility, and potential migration impact. The analysis results will be used to transform the business objectives of the organization into feasible solutions, so as to provide a clear value proposition that the organization's stakeholders will understand.
Create Migration Architect Role
Before an organization can begin its cloud migration process, it must create the role of migration architect responsible for leading the work. The migration architect is a system architect level staff member who is responsible for completing all aspects of the migration.
When organizing and implementing major migration tasks, it is necessary to formulate and implement some decisions and technical plans. This is where the migration architect plays a role by being responsible for every aspect of the migration process, which is critical to the success of the project.
Select single cloud or enter multi cloud
Before starting the cloud migration process, organizations need to answer some questions - "Do you need to select a single cloud computing service provider to migrate its infrastructure? Do you need the best optimization to run in a single environment? Is it a better choice to use cloud computing services from multiple cloud providers?"
It is a relatively simple task for organizations to cooperate with selected cloud computing providers. The development team of the organization only needs a set of cloud APIs to understand, and its applications can freely use all the functions provided by the selected cloud computing provider.
In other words, the disadvantage of this method is that the cloud computing provider locking terms. Once the application is updated to work with a single provider, the task of moving the application to a single provider usually requires almost as much work as the initial cloud migration. Secondly, independent cloud migration may also have a negative impact on the organization's ability to discuss key terms with cloud computing service providers, service level agreements (SLAs) and pricing.
Different cloud platforms use different applications
This is probably the simplest multi cloud method, which runs one set of applications on the cloud platform of a single cloud computing service provider and another set of applications on the cloud platform of another cloud computing service provider.
The advantage of this approach is that it provides organizations or users with additional business utilization from multiple service providers, as well as the flexibility to decide where to get each application. It also allows users to optimize each application based on the running services.
Running applications across multiple cloud providers
Organizations can also choose to run some applications on the cloud platform of a specific cloud computing provider, while running another part of applications on the cloud platform of another provider. The advantage of this approach is that it allows you to take advantage of the key advantages offered by each approach (e.g., advanced AI capabilities and better database speed). However, the risk is that applications may be limited to performance, and problems with any service provider's cloud platform will affect the application's performance and customer experience.
For example, organizations can use Microsoft Azure computing engines because they are relatively cheap and use completely different cloud platforms for storage, such as Firebase for object storage or AWS elastic file system for extensible file storage. In addition, organizations can use the AI of Google Cloud without having to fully enter their ecosystem.
Building applications
Many organizations develop applications that can run anywhere. The advantage of this approach is that organizations can choose cloud platforms that span multiple service providers and run their applications simultaneously, or distribute application load among each cloud computing service provider. The flexibility provided by this model is the basis for organizations to enter into supplier negotiations, because they can transfer loads between cloud service providers.
However, the disadvantage is that organizations may find it difficult to take advantage of the core functions of each cloud computing service provider they participate in. This significantly reduces the potential benefits of hosting their applications on the cloud. This approach can also complicate the application development and validation process.
Select a cloud computing solution provider
If the organization is not familiar with cloud computing technology, it is important to consider establishing a partnership with cloud computing experts, who have developed a series of expertise in the fields required by the organization. These experts will be able to focus on the connection between the development organization and the matching cloud computing solution provider. Then, they can also create, deploy and sometimes operate the organization's IT infrastructure through cloud computing.
Selecting a team that supports the migration process should help the organization select the appropriate public cloud solution to successfully achieve its business goals.
The team will be able to identify opportunities in the cloud migration process and help develop a detailed migration plan, including:
(1) Business case (2) workload priority (3) cost analysis (4) optimal workload for migration
This will prove critical when defining the scope of the migration and building the business case for stakeholders.
Define migration scope
In the initial phase of migration to the cloud, organizations need to determine their goals from the process and clearly define the scope of participation. This will give the organization the opportunity to define the required results and focus on developing an assessment for migration to the cloud.
The task of the migration team is to outline resource requirements, data collection methods and the process of evaluating cloud computing. Cloud computing assessment will include discovering and evaluating existing on premises IT infrastructure and prioritizing migration.
Collect key infrastructure data
If the organization cooperates with experts of cloud computing service providers, data collection is likely to include direct cooperation with expert teams and internal IT teams of the organization. The two teams will jointly implement comprehensive data collection and create a detailed application inventory.
The organization should start with an agentless data collection tool and perform a basic scan of existing servers. After the scan is completed, a check will be performed to identify the failure and assess the problems that may need to be resolved before the migration process begins.
In most cases, this will involve performance evaluation of resources used for computing, storage, and networking. As the analysis proceeds, the organization or working group will be able to establish capacity supply cases to ensure that the proposed solutions are efficient and cost-effective.
Analyze the migration plan in depth
Once the data collection process is complete, the next step is to conduct an in-depth analysis of the proposed migration plan. In other respects, this includes:
(1) Core organizational objectives (2) Application identification, classification and workload (3) Hardware infrastructure, storage, facilities and maintenance costs (4) Disaster recovery requirements
An operational migration plan is determined here, which can start from workload preparation analysis. In particular, the prioritization of workloads can help organizations achieve the main objectives outlined in the assessment.
Provide business cases and solutions
Finally, it is time to deliver the business case and proposed solutions. The early work of data collection will create an application manifest. Cloud computing experts should be able to help enterprise teams develop business cases, understand the list of workloads that have been prioritized, and provide corresponding migration costs for each workload.
The final stage also includes creating a systematic workload migration plan. Once the migration process is clearly described and presented, all relevant teams will have a clear concept of the detailed architecture, and the organization's migration team will be able to migrate key production applications to the new cloud computing environment.
conclusion
When cloud migration is involved, correct migration must be carried out from the beginning. Corrective measures cannot be taken later. Organizations and migration teams can use this broad roadmap to complete cloud migration tasks, while ensuring that the right level of expertise can be identified and positioned during design and deployment