The move to embrace Cloud for your business has become an inevitable part of growth but moving data from traditional infrastructure to a cloud platform can be daunting. The process of cloud migration is complex and different for every organization depending on their needs and existing frameworks. In this digital era, your business must perform faster and handle more capacity to respond to evolving customer demands. Your enterprise also must be able to support and integrate new technologies such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Modern Cloud systems can help you become compatible with emerging technologies and give your business a competitive edge.
Before starting your journey to migrate your applications to the cloud, you will need a cloud migration strategy that ensures the least disruption to services and fulfills your organizational goals. A detailed assessment of your application and infrastructure estate along with immediate and long-term business goals for migration is a crucial first step for a successful migration. The “6 Rs of Cloud migration” comprises of all the scenarios that you will encounter while adopting cloud technology. Let’s take a look at each of these 6 strategies in detail.
Rehost
Rehosting is the easiest and also the least expensive strategy to migrate to Cloud from an on-premises setup. The method is also called Lift and Shift and takes servers or applications from the current hosting environment and shifts them to infrastructure in the public cloud. This mode of migration involves moving your application as-is without altering the code, architecture, or functionality. It provides the original application experience on the cloud and is a common strategy for organizations starting their migration journey. It provides significant cost savings over on-premises setup with the pay-as-you-go scalable cloud infrastructure. A drawback of this strategy is that the data is processed locally and only the finalized data is stored on the Cloud, which means you are not able to take full advantage of Cloud services.
Replatform
Replatforming, also known as Lift, Tinker, and Shift modifies the lift and shift strategy and makes optimizations to the application during the migration process. The process involves updating operating systems or databases or making slight changes to the code to take advantage of the new cloud infrastructure. This is a good strategy to adopt when you want to build trust in the cloud technology while deriving benefits like increased system performance. But it is important to manage the scope of changes to be made in this phase to avoid unnecessary modifications and become a complete refactoring plan.
Refactor
Refactoring or Rearchitecting strategy involves rebuilding or redeploying the applications using cloud-native features. This strategy is the most resource-intensive option as it requires a complete overhaul of your applications to adapt them to the Cloud. This strategy is applied when you have outdated systems that need modernization to become compatible with modern cloud technologies. The application is broken down into smaller building blocks and microservices and bundled into containers for deployment to the cloud. This approach allows for optimized use of the cloud leading to cloud-native platform benefits and making the application compatible with emerging technologies. Refactoring has the highest transformation cost but comes with an opportunity to make your business process more agile and efficient.
Repurchase
Repurchasing also called Replacing involves the complete replacement of legacy applications with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions that provide similar capabilities. This strategy is cost-effective but may require changes in business processes depending on the customizations provided by the third-party vendors. There also might be some challenges because of inexperience with the newer software which can be overcome with training sessions for the new platform.
Retire
In the Retire strategy, the applications that are not required anymore are explicitly phased out. It is important to identify redundant applications before migrating to the cloud. The redundant applications could have functionalities that are being covered by other modern applications. In such cases, you must take a call to simply retire the services so that you can focus on applications with immediate business value.
Retain
The Retain approach means you do not migrate to Cloud at this time and revisit the migration later. This can happen when you are lacking important information or there are compliance issues for moving data from your on-premises systems. In such cases, you must revisit the cloud migration plan when you have complete information or when you have received the required compliance to move data from you on-premises systems.
How to choose the right strategy for your business?
To select the right strategy, it is important to conduct a cloud readiness assessment for your organization and finalize the short-term and long-term business goals to be achieved. Every business use case will require a different strategy and you will need to tailor your migration accordingly.
The right cloud technology partner can help you understand the technical, financial, and operational challenges related to the migration process and identify the right strategy for you which is aligned with your business goals.
Final Thoughts
Careful analysis of business goals and current architecture is needed before starting the migration journey. To ensure a smooth and successful cloud migration, we work with you to develop a migration plan that takes into account the complexities, challenges, and costs involved.
Contact our Azure Cloud experts at enterprisesales@celebaltech.com to know more about cloud adoption for your business.
