Mastering the ability to migrate your organization's workloads to the cloud is essential for small-to-medium (SMBs) to get it right. Moving, migrating, creating, and retiring legacy applications from their legacy systems into a cloud-native platform is costly, complex, and (usually) much needed.

How an organization migrates to the cloud doesn't start with a "how" but with a "Why?"

Why do organizations migrate to the cloud? Cost savings? Is the SMB transforming their business from a legacy waterfall to a more agile thinking? Or does moving to the cloud establish a more dynamic brand for your organization?

This article will serve as a guide for SMB organizations looking to answer why, how, and when they should migrate to the cloud. Along with understanding these questions, this guide will provide some beneficial guidelines to assist organizations in mastering cloud migration.

What is Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration is the transformation journey for organizations that involves moving their existing applications and databases to either a public cloud hosted by cloud service providers or a hosted Software-as-a-Service(SaaS) platform.

How organizations migrate depends on what they plan to do with the cloud solutions and what business processes become enacted after the migration. The post-migration process for any cloud migration project is just as crucial as the migration process for organizations moving to public cloud services or hybrid clouds.

How Important is Cloud Migration For Small to Medium Organizations?

Learning to master the entire migration process is essential for SMB organizations to achieve the positive gains of moving to the cloud and minimize the risk of data storage costs, security risks, and user complaints while doing so with limited staff.

Organizations must grasp costs even during the migration process. Even during the design phase of the migration, understanding the current organization's costs, including data center, servers, maintenance costs, utility, and support operational costs, is critical. If cost reduction is a central drive for migration to the cloud at the top of the list, knowing the current cost expenses is essential.

As the organization maps out the migration, what costs become part of the post-migration budget? What current costs become replaced with cloud-based expenses?

Organizations recognize many advantages of a cloud computing strategy:

• Faster development of new applications and services.
• The ability to scale up and scale out infrastructure to handle spikes in traffic and data access.
• Organizations are realigning their financial capital from Capex to OPEX spending.
• By moving cloud resources to utility models, organizations can adjust their spending based on need and avoid long-time building costs, public utility bills, and other on-premise expenditures.

The cost of additional security adaptive controls, including data-at-rest encryption and data-in-transit, cloud-based security broker (CASB) licenses, cloud-based identity management, virtual firewalls, network segmentation solutions, and zero-trust, all become part of the
post-cloud experience.

What to Consider Before Cloud Migration?

What steps should an organization take before executing a cloud migration strategy?

1. The organization must assess its current applications and platforms to determine whether it can become cloud-based. Many legacy applications were not designed to become cloud-based and often can not leverage cloud services.
2. Organizations must evaluate the select group of cloud providers to determine which meets their business objectives. Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services are two of the largest cloud providers in the world. However, others are more vendor-specific applications that may align with the organization's needs. Microsoft Azure features their application cloud-based portfolio along with support for third-party applications. Oracle Cloud is another vendor-specific offering to clients with extensive global transaction databases, and security compliance needs to consider leveraging. Salesforce.com is globally known for its vast library of applications, APIs, and connectors. Many organizations that standardize on Salesforce.com tools will often leverage their cloud platform.
3. Implement a CloudOps strategy before any pre- or post-cloud migration. Having this framework in place for the entire journey will ensure that your cloud journey effort is well-spent.
4. Training is essential for any pre and post-core cloud migration strategies.

Understanding What is a Lift & Shift Cloud Migration.

An essential term organizations should be familiar with is Lift & Shift. This term focuses on the need for the application to migrate the current application and data into the cloud with minimal changes. This method is standard for organizations wanting to scale up their memory, computing, and storage capabilities within a cloud instance without changing the original application.

Lift & Shift doesn't align with applications that have several interdependencies. Specifically, if a legacy application requires a specific database format or has a network latency below 15 ms, the organization could be required to keep the application as is and choose to develop a new platform.

How to Migrate to the Cloud?

There are several ways organizations can migrate to the cloud. The aim of the migration, and whether legacy, new, or old applications will be retired as part of the project, will inform a considerable portion of the migration decision making.

Organizations can choose from seven cloud strategies when migrating to the cloud. They may could choose one or several strategies within the same agile sprint or follow the legacy waterfall method, focusing only on one at a time.

Here are the seven cloud strategies:

• Rehosting: Rehosting is when an organization uses the Lift & Shift model to migrate an existing workload into an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform with minimal changes to the application.
• Redeploying: Like rehosting, organizations may leverage the Lift-and-Shift model to move the application into a host-based virtualized environment.
• Repackaging: In this model, organizations will repackage the migrated application to leverage more cloud-based tools and capabilities.
• Refactoring: This strategy is common for organizations that choose to develop a brand new application instead of porting over an existing on-premise application.
• Repurchasing: Another standard decision organizations make is to phase out their legacy application and choose to port it into a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) service.
• Retiring: This strategy will coincide with others. Once an application has been migrated, including the data, organizations will retire legacy applications to help reduce costs.
• Retaining: Retaining an application is less common than most cloud strategies. However, if an organization refactors an application, it retains access to the legacy application to meet compliance or privacy mandates.

How to Migrate Legacy Applications to the Cloud?

Once the organization has decided which cloud migration strategy to adopt and enabled CloudOps, the next migration component is the decision surrounding legacy applications.

Cloud migration models like rehosting, redeploying, repackaging, retiring, and keeping give an organization options regarding its legacy applications. A separate strategy becomes an option on a per-application basis.

How Long Does Cloud Migration Take?

The timeline for moving to the cloud depends on the legacy application, business process, and data. Organizations will refactor their legacy applications, either by developing a new platform or repurchasing a similar application hosted by a SaaS provider. It could take much longer than repurchasing a similar application hosted by a SaaS provider. SaaS applications have a faster ramp-up time than redeploying or rehosting.

If the legacy application contains considerable data, organizations may repurchase it under a SaaS model and leave it alone until the retention period expires.

Why do Cloud Migration Strategies Matter?

Organizations concerned with cost and post-operational model need to adopt a CloudOps culture parallel to their migration plan. CloudOps merges cost monitoring and cloud operations under one scrum-like team to better optimize cloud investment. Organizations choosing to avoid adopting a CloudOps strategy discover many challenges in cost containment, poor operational efficiencies, and less-than-desirable customer experience.

Mastering cloud migrations starts with an organization clearly understanding what the cloud means to its customers, employees, and partners and developing a repeatable process for future projects.

Hypershift Cloud Migration Services

SMBs often need more in-house resources to perform a cloud migration, enable CloudOps, or staff enough resources to monitor or manage their new cloud environment. Our company, Hypershift, provides SMBs with the tools, human capital resources, and expertise to help with their entire migration process. Our team of cloud experts also offers resources to help staff your security operations center 24 x 7 x 365.

Contact us today to discuss your cloud migration project!