67% of businesses have migrated their workloads to the cloud in 2020 alone. Are you considering following this trend? If so, you’ll need a stellar cloud migration strategy. Otherwise, your services will have poor performance, which your customers will also experience.
Throughout this guide, you’ll first learn the benefits of cloud migration. Afterward, this guide will cover the most efficient cloud migration roadmap and select a good cloud migration provider.
What Are the Benefits of Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration can potentially have a massive impact on your services. First off, you’re letting a company that specializes in cloud computing handle your services. Because of this, you’ll have access to disaster recovery features, massive data centers, and more.
Other benefits of cloud migration include:
Scalability: enables you to control resources based on your businesses needs—whether you want to expand or use fewer resources
Enhanced performance: better computing capabilities lead to enhanced performance
Security: most providers offer robust built-in features that handle challenging security issues
Cost reduction: you don’t need to maintain data centers and only pay for what you use
Your 5 Step Cloud Migration Roadmap
To ensure you transition your services smoothly, you’ll need to craft an optimal cloud migration strategy. Throughout this section, you’ll learn how to create your goals and manifest them while enhancing your product.
1. Determine Your Cloud Migration Goals
Before embarking on any endeavor, you’ll need to figure out the goals for your transition into the cloud. Otherwise, you won’t have any indicators to label your migration as a success. Moreover, you’ll also find yourself confused. Everyone will have different goals, so we can’t create one for you. However, we can help. First, you’ll need to ask yourself a couple of questions.
What are my objectives for this cloud migration? Your answer could involve reducing expenses or supporting your infrastructure for expansion.
What technology principles should your business follow? Answer questions to figure out what technology your business will need to achieve your goals.
Once you’ve assembled your goals, you will need to build a plan with your team to prepare for various scenarios. That way, if you encounter any downtime, bugs, crashes, or other undesirable scenarios, your team is ready to tackle it.
2. Cloud Data Migration Methods
Unfortunately, there isn’t a single data migration strategy to select. There are 6. However, each method has unique characteristics that offer distinct advantages to your business.
These methods include:
- Rehosting: the most cost-effective option that redeploys your codebase in a cloud environment
- Repurchasing: using a cloud service provider to replace your existing on-premise solution
- Replatforming: similar to rehosting, except that it requires changing cloud vendors, which will require more optimization
- Refactoring: requires more work; however, refactoring transforms your IT architecture
- Retaining: keeps parts of your infrastructure on-premise, which makes this method best for security
- Retiring: abandon obsolete applications or parts of your codebase—great for optimizing your system
3. Pick a Good Cloud Service Provider
You’ll need to create criteria when choosing the cloud migration services. Otherwise, you may end up with a service that won’t provide optimal results. The following will show you a checklist on how to pick the best services.
Cost
Various variables determine the price of your cloud migration services. In this scenario, you will need to shop around and inspect each provider’s features, performance, and support. From there, you will want to choose what price will best fit your needs.
Performance
Regarding performance, one of the most critical factors to look for is low latency. Otherwise, your customers will experience lag and sluggish loading times if your setup struggles with high latency. Because of that, you may lose out on customers.
Support
Without responsive customer service, you wouldn’t have support and specialists to help you if you run into any issues. Moreover, you will want to check for additional features. One includes ways you can contact customer service. Others include availability and whether you have to pay a premium price for priority support.
Before purchasing, you could test their customer service responsiveness by contacting the company. If they’re responsive, then they’re a good fit. Otherwise, you may want to keep shopping.
Services
With a wide selection of cloud vendors to select, you’ll notice that some have tens, others over 100, extra services to enhance your product. Some services include machine learning, data monitoring, automation, and more.
However, you will want to keep in mind that the company will charge more for their software with the addition of services.
4. Migrate to the Cloud
Once you have steps 1 through 3 assembled, you will need to relay what’s happening to your employees and customers. That way, they won’t suffer from disruptions throughout the migration process. Afterward, your cloud migration team will transition your code into data services. Meanwhile, you will want the rest of your team preparing for the incoming cloud system.
Ways your other employees can contribute to the company’s migration include crafting data compliance policies and adjusting security measures.
5. Optimize Your Setup
Since you have everything ready, you’ll need to optimize. This step includes fixing, adjusting, and performing other tasks. You’ll need to make these adjustments throughout different parts of your product like:
Tweaking your codebase: that way, you enhance your product’s performance
Testing: ensure everything works
Integrating new technology: feedback pipelines, automated testing, and microservices
Once you finish this step, you’ve completed your cloud migration. From here, you will need to monitor your product and make adjustments when needed.
Unleash Your Data’s True Potential
If you’ve followed this cloud migration roadmap, you’re taking the first step toward transitioning your business into the modern age. Moreover, you’re transforming your services into a data-driven performance powerhouse.
What’s the next step? First, explore various cloud migration tools. Afterward, choose what service best fits your business’ needs.
Schedule a free 15-minute phone call with Buda Consulting to learn how we can help you get more out of your Oracle and SQL Server database investments.
