Blog Summary:

This blog serves as a comprehensive guide for businesses looking to adopt cloud data migration to move their workloads and applications to a new hosting environment. Know the 7Rs strategies to complete cloud data migration successfully, followed by 5 important phases. You will also be introduced to the benefits and challenges of cloud in this blog.

In recent years, there has been a surge in cloud solutions demand. Mainly, because organizations aiming for optimal efficiency from cloud environments. But it is not so easy as it requires migration strategy and dedicated focus to adopt this new-age digital experience – cloud data migration.

Otherwise, even slight incompetence may result in further delays at higher costs. You will be surprised to know that it is estimated more than 95% of workloads are ready to shift to cloud-native platforms by 2025, as per Gartner analysis.

Having said that, if you are also looking for scalability, flexibility, and agility in your workloads, adapting cloud data migration will be the right choice for you. This transition can not only help you access data remotely but also accommodate the changing market conditions.

By reading this blog further, you will learn the strategies of cloud data migration along with its benefits and challenges. This blog will help the CTOs and CEOs understand why it is so important for their businesses.

What is Cloud Data Migration?

Cloud migration is the process of moving business elements such as important data, and applications to the cloud. Sometimes, moving applications from one environment to another client environment is also called cloud data migration.

This migration process makes sure you have better flexibility and scalability to your important assets of your organization. Businesses having a large volume of data can make the most of cloud data migration.

This process not only finds a way to store large amounts of data but also provides other numerous benefits. This comprehensive solution can help you build a sustainable future for your business, keeping you ahead of the market competition.

Importance of Cloud Data Migration

Regardless of your business size, it’s crucial to find a way if you have a large volume of data and applications. That’s where cloud data migration comes into the play, helping you out with better flexibility and scalability. It will further aid you in streamlining business operations and implementing more advanced technologies like AI. As a result, you can achieve remarkable business growth.

Secondly, when you want to protect your data to keep it safe in a cloud environment, then cloud migration is an ideal option for you.

But if you are planning to migrate for the first time, then you need to come up with robust migration strategies. Yes, you need a right strategy before transitioning your entire system to cloud computing.

Another factor is cost effectiveness. Opting for a cloud migration can prove to be less expensive as it does not require setting up whole new infrastructure.

This migration plays an important role in reducing overall operational costs as it comes with pay-as-you-go models from cloud providers. This is how businesses have great chances of avoiding unnecessary expenditure.

Moreover, cloud data migration becomes important if you want to access organization assets or applications from any corner of the world. This means you can easily work remotely without compromising on efficiency.

This is how cloud data migration plays a major role in transforming your business digitally and helping you achieve organizational goals.

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Benefits of Cloud Data Migration

The transition of important business data into cloud platforms can return significant benefits to your organization. This transformative approach may bring some major benefits once you complete the cloud migration of your existing system.

Cloud Data Migration Benefits

Here is the list of benefits that you might want to consider:

1. Performance

One of the key benefits is enhanced performance because when websites or applications are hosted in the cloud, it is relatively easy for numerous users to access it from anywhere, minimizing network latency.

At any stage, you can carry out real-time performance analysis before or after cloud migration to make sure you are getting most of it.

2. Cost

Cloud migration can be done at relatively low cost as it requires low maintenance and less upgrades. This cost-effective solution saves a lot of money while migrating your applications to the cloud environment. Hence, neither you overspend on IT operations nor you need more time in transition.

3. Scalability

Businesses can achieve scalability when you are using cloud computing instead of physical infrastructures. This means there is no need of relying on physical servers, issuing software licenses or bringing more network equipment to your premises.

In return, what you get is desired business scalability and adaptability to counter changing demands.

4. Digital Experience

If your business making a switch to a cloud environment means you are digitally transforming your business that is expected to reach new heights. The best part of this migration is that users can access services sitting anywhere across the globe along with better user experience.

Cloud Data Migration Challenges

Cloud migrations can prove to be a time consuming and costly process for organizations making transition to the new cloud environment.

Challenges of Cloud Data Migration Inner image

Here is the list of challenges for cloud migration:

Data Security and Compliance

Even though cloud environments have secured infrastructure, it’s up to your organization to make sure security measures are in place. You need to check whether moving data and applications have better security control or not.

This is because Transferring large-size data poses a significant risk when configuring access controls in different environments. Hence, data security and compliance comes as a big challenge for your organization.

Data Cleanup

If you are happy to proceed further with the cloud data migration process, another huge challenge comes up is data clean up. This occurs in the pre-migration phase where you need to ensure that data likely to be transferred is accurate and relevant without any duplicacy or inconsistent format.

In short, you need to double check if the data is clean and compiled in the right format for successful migration. 

Legacy System Complexities

Such migration into the cloud can be challenging and time consuming as these traditional methods may not be fully compatible with modern-day services like cloud. Additionally, you may have data structure issues or need to refactor some application parts.

Thus, your team should build a robust strategy and execution to avoid legacy system complexities before you actually start the migration process.

Cost Management

Businesses may fall prey to increased cost post-migration as your business grows gradually. If you fail to understand the pricing models while choosing cloud services, then you may overspend in data transferring, storage or incur higher monitoring costs.

Another reason is not setting up a clear strategy on what to spend or not once the migration process is over. These factors can badly affect your cloud cost optimization management, leading to budget overturns.

Vendor Lock-in

Vendor Lock-in piles up as one of the challenges of cloud implementation usually for organizations having newly-appointed cloud providers. Your chosen provider may offer plenty of services, but cannot take advantage of all of them once you have locked-in the vendor for a specific period of time.

This can prove to be a costly mistake in case you are not satisfied with current cloud providers and it won’t be easy to rope in other providers until the completion of their service.

Lack of Strategy

Not having a migration strategy can lead to extended timelines and high resource cost. This challenge is usually because of many organizations failing to outline strategy before starting the migration process.

Since many applications have different requirements, lack of proper planning can lead to unsuccessful cloud migration and increased overall costs. Therefore, it becomes necessary to check each business workload before migrating into the cloud.

Cloud Migration Strategies (The 7Rs)

Most startups and businesses prefer cloud data migration to keep their workload and applications safe into the cloud platform. But, to complete the migration process successfully, you need a strategic approach before moving any data into the cloud.

Strategies of Cloud Migration

Here are the 7Rs strategies you will need to implement cloud data migration successfully to your organization:

1. Refactor/Re-architect

Refactoring or re-architecturing workloads is conducted to assess cloud-native capabilities. With refactoring, applications are made compatible with autoscaling and serverless computing, paving the way for a future-proof approach to achieving a new level of automation.

This expensive maneuver involves making necessary changes to the application to optimize it for the cloud environment.

2. Replatform (Lift and Reshape)

Replatform strategy is formed by keeping applications operational without changing their source codes, leveraging cloud-native capabilities. It not only helps you reach a new level of automation, but also enhances flexibility and agility.

That’s how replatform strategy can optimize your business workload by eliminating the needs of rewriting the application code. 

3. Repurchase (Drop and Shop)

In the repurchase strategy, legacy systems are replaced with services managed by your new cloud providers. This model of cloud deployment helps you minimize infrastructure costs as it is managed by vendors instead of your in-house team.

The repurchase strategy is designed to enhance application performance and provide better scalability for the migration process. 

4. Rehost (Lift and Shift)

Rehost is another part of the migrating strategy that allows you to migrate your applications to the cloud without even changing the core infrastructure.

Cloud native experts mostly prefer this strategy to transfer their existing applications into the cloud. It ensures compatibility with storage and network requirements for the applications.

5. Relocate (Hypervisor-level Lift and Shift)

Relocate strategy takes care of your data being moved to the cloud infrastructure without need of additional hardware support or rewriting of the application code. It ensures you remain connected throughout the migration process with minimum disruption.

With a relocation strategy, you don’t even need to invest heavily on hardware or employee training programs.

6. Retain (Revisit)

Deploying the retain strategy means enabling your applications to operate in the existing framework rather than migrating it to the cloud. This strategic decision comes into effect if an organization decides to retain a workload due to another application that needs immediate migration to the cloud.

7. Retire

When any of the applications are required to be terminated, the Retire strategy can be used by organizations. This strategy helps to downsize those applications which are no longer needed in production.

Usually, businesses retire important applications that are difficult to operate in existing frameworks as a part of initiating cloud migration.

Phases of Cloud Data Migration

Transition of your business data or application into a cloud platform includes five phases: Prepare, Plan Migrate, operate and optimize. In this process, you can smoothly incorporate your workload into cloud-based environments with minimal disruption.

Cloud Migration Phases

Preparation

In this initial phase, you need to discuss business objectives with your cloud service provider. This phase is to show readiness before making a transition.

Such a maneuver can help you assess if there are any loopholes that you may need to fix before moving ahead. Also, Finalize what data or applications you actually need to move into the cloud environment.

At this stage, you also need to keep a tab on total cost of ownership (TCO), which means to prepare a business case for whatever asset you choose to move to the cloud. This can be better done by using cloud cost calculators that predict overall costs of storage, network and other resources.

Planning

After defining the business objectives, shift your focus to creating a migration plan in the next phase. Prepare the migrating order by prioritizing which applications or data should be moved to the cloud first.

This phase also includes verifying the applications whether it needs any further modifications or not. You can even know if there is a need for data encryption. Here, at this point, you also need to check if there is data which requires to be synced on a regular basis.

Or low-priority data that can be migrated during the initial stages. The reason for doing this is to easily create a roadmap for the cloud migration process, where you are the one who determines what goes first into the cloud.

Migration

This is the crucial phase in which you need to move data, applications or business workload to the cloud-based environment. In this phase, you can migrate applications without any modifications or modifying them to get benefit of cloud-native services.

You need to double check if things are working as expected or not. Sometimes data may become inaccessible to some users and if that is the case, then you need to confirm working of migrated data before you move on to the next.

Hence, in the migration phase, it is all about monitoring if the proceedings are as per the plan or not. 

Operation

When you are done with the migration phase, it is time to check if your data or applications are performing at the optimal level. It includes taking feedback and doing necessary adjustments if needed for your cloud operations.

This stage is also important for you to determine data security to ensure everything is working properly in the new environment, meeting HIPAA and GDPR compliance.

This post-migration process helps you to continuously monitor app performance in the cloud environment as well as manage the operational costs. Thus, in this phase, you need to execute cloud data migration as per pre-planned phases. 

Optimization

Once you are finished with the above four phases, the last thing you need to do is optimization, where you must look for increasing efficiency and improving app performance.

This process can further open the door for cost savings opportunities. It allows you to take advantage of cloud-native features to make sure the app continues to run at optimal level in the new environment.

This stage is equally important as the above four phases because it aids you in enhancing cloud operations that can result in desired business success.

Lastly, you should also look after your team if they are finding it difficult to access data in the newly-developed cloud environment. 

These phases help you complete the migration of crucial data into the cloud environment while meeting your business objectives.

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Why Are Organizations Moving into Cloud Computing?

Businesses generating large volumes of important data are running out of storage which means it is more difficult to store and access business data. The only solution to get rid of this data storage problem is migrating into Cloud.

Here is why many organizations are transitioning into cloud computing:

1. Easier Data Backup

When you have a physical infrastructure as a solution for data storage, what usually happens is frequent data loss. That’s why it is preferred to choose a cloud environment where you can have automated data backup as soon as you store it.

Cloud-based data storage ensures you can rest easy, with its capability to restore your data anytime.

2. Cost Effective

Most organizations opt for the cloud migration process because of its cost effectiveness. Your growing business also means expansion of user data and important business assets.

This could be a real concern if you didn’t get a solution to deal with data storage problems for a long term. In this scenario, a cloud environment satisfies your requirements as you only pay for what you actually use.

3. Capital Expenses Replaced with Operational Expenses

Large enterprises opting for cloud computing solutions means there is no such need for making capital investments in on-premise servers.

In fact, cloud migration solutions eliminate the need for capital investments in such a way that you only pay for your operational expenses instead of overspending on physical infrastructure. 

4. No Need of IT Personnel

Since on-premise solutions have high requirements of IT individuals, organizations are turning to cloud computing where they don’t need IT professionals to invest time and look after managing business data.

All they do is simply switch to a cloud environment without help of IT personnel and keep important assets safe and handy.

How to Choose the Right Cloud Service Provider?

Opting for cloud migration service means you need to carefully choose the right cloud service provider. The process is as similar as choosing the trusted mover whenever you are shifting your home.

The same thing applies to the cloud migration process. You can’t ask any inexperienced providers to start the migration process into the cloud. Or else, it may lead to major risks.

While choosing the right cloud service provider make sure they create a migration strategy before starting the data migration into the cloud. Next, you must check if they offer overall support throughout the migration process.

In addition to that flexibility is also equally important while choosing the cloud provider. This is because if things do not go as planned, you will have a chance to approach another one.

In this process, you do not have to worry about tools and applications as you can still ask new cloud providers to continue using them. Hence, it is advisable to carefully include service agreements that clearly states the discontinuation of services if required.

Bringing in an experienced cloud development service provider can get things done easily.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, it is clear that cloud data migration is a somewhat complex process, but it can reap many benefits if you get your migration strategy right. Before moving forward, you must consider several factors like budget, storage, training and time.

Also, it is recommended to hire experienced developers who can ease your data migration process in a short period of time. Remember that each organization has their own unique requirements and therefore it is necessary to start with building robust migration strategies.

To complete this cloud migration, you need highly skilled and experienced professionals from trusted mobile app development companies. Moon Technolabs is one such company that offers cloud migration services at enterprise level. Ask Moon Technolabs for customized cloud solutions now. 

FAQs

01

Which cloud service is currently in highest demand?

As of now, AWS is experiencing high demand because of its wide range of products and services such as storage, database, network and tooling support. Currently, AWS is popular among enterprise-level businesses, startups as well as government agencies.

02

Can Moon Technolabs help me solve cloud data migration challenges?

Definitely, Moon Technolabs has experienced developers that are happy to assist you at any stage of the migration process. In fact, they analyze the root cause of the problem and help you find the proper solution so that you can smoothly make the transition into a cloud environment.

03

What things should I keep in mind while finding cloud service providers?

To get the right cloud service provider, explore if they are offering services compatible with different kinds of workloads. In the next step, check if they provide round-the-clock support and security to your important business asset. Microsoft, AWS, and Google are ideal cloud solution providers for any small or large-size business.
About Author

Jayanti Katariya is the CEO of Moon Technolabs, a fast-growing IT solutions provider, with 18+ years of experience in the industry. Passionate about developing creative apps from a young age, he pursued an engineering degree to further this interest. Under his leadership, Moon Technolabs has helped numerous brands establish their online presence and he has also launched an invoicing software that assists businesses to streamline their financial operations.