Migration to the Cloud - what does it look like?

What does Cloud Migration look like?

Moving to the cloud can be a daunting task that many simply do not feel ready to face. However, in todays increasingly digital world and post Covid, a lot of companies have accelerated their digital transformation journeys in order to become or remain agile, adaptable and innovative even in the most unexpected of circumstances.

If your company has any or all of the following, you may see major benefits in moving to the Cloud either wholly or partially - 

Digital Assets

Databases

Services

Applications

IT related resources

A move to the cloud, wholly or partially of the above components could and does lead to benefits such as improved flexibility, operational efficiency improvements, cost reduction, immediate access to data and reporting, centralised data repository, scalability and much more. In order to see these benefits however, it is critical to plan your move to the Cloud with care, precision and tangible, measurable outcomes.

As with most projects, the first step is to map out the outcomes you would like to achieve by moving to the Cloud. It may be to lower cost, by getting rid of old, legacy servers, it may be to reduce duplication across the business by having one singular data source or it may be that you want to give your customers a better experience - you need to understand your reasons so you can measure them at a later date.

The next step is understanding how you can achieve these outcomes and what elements they will involve - is it all of the applications you currently use that will contribute to these outcomes? Is it a few? Or, is it none of them and you need a whole new set of applications to achieve your outcomes? It is useful at this stage to rank your applications/data etc to determine which are going to be easier to move, and which are going to be more difficult or even impossible. This can act as a priority list.

Next, you need to determine how you want to deployment method you are going to use. There are generally three options -

Hybrid Deployment (combination of multiple settings and Data Centres. It allows you a combination of on premises data centres and private or public clouds)

Multi-Cloud Deployment (Multi-cloud deployment is the usage of different public cloud computing infrastructures. For instance, you combine apps from many cloud service providers with redundancy and backup features)

Or, Single cloud Deployment (A single-cloud deployment is an option for smaller companies that only need one product line from a cloud provider. Although this type of cloud migration deployment may be the simplest, it also has the most limitations)