Cloud Migration Strategy With StormIT: How to Do it Right

In this article you will learn:

• The benefits of migrating to the cloud
• Seven key considerations for cloud migration
• StormIT cloud migration best practices
• StormIT cloud migration approach and strategy
• Conclusion and StormIT cloud migration services

Businesses of all sizes are being drawn to the cloud for a range of reasons. By migrating to the cloud, organizations will be able to focus on business innovation instead of concentrating on maintaining their complex IT infrastructures.

Cloud migration is an important topic not only for enterprises but also for smaller companies with simpler workloads. According to the Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report, enterprises are running 47 percent of workloads and storing 44 percent of data in a public cloud. Small or medium businesses are running 64 percent of workloads and storing 59 percent of data in a public cloud.

The diagram below shows that organizations are running 50 percent of their workloads and storing 46 percent of data in a public cloud.

Are you planning a migration to the cloud? When you migrate to the AWS Cloud with StormIT, you get the support you need for a successful migration. We will choose the right cloud migration strategy for you.

What are the benefits of cloud migration?

While every organization is going to have its unique motivations, there are four typical drivers for migrating current solutions to the public cloud:

• User agility and control: The number one reason customers choose to move to the cloud is for the agility they gain. With the cloud, you can simply start hundreds of servers in minutes as opposed to the ten to 18 weeks it typically takes to start servers used on-premises. This helps businesses to speed up the delivery of IT projects that are critical to revenue growth or cost reduction.
• Flexibility and scalability: Cloud computing allows businesses the flexibility to scale their IT resources (e.g. virtual machines, databases, etc.) up or down to meet sudden spikes in demand or unpredictable needs. This results in a dramatic increase in agility for your organization since the time it takes to develop, experiment and put into production is significantly lower.
• Cost savings: Cloud computing can lower your TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). By using cloud computing, you can achieve a lower cost than would be achievable on your own. Because usage from thousands of customers is aggregated in the cloud, this translates into lower pay.
• Security and compliance: With cloud infrastructure, it’s easy to control where your data is stored, who can access it, and what resources your organization is using at any given moment. You also have access to monitoring activities in your cloud infrastructure at any given time.

Seven key considerations for cloud migration strategy

We summarized seven key considerations that we believe all organizations need to know or at least understand before moving to the cloud:

Which applications to migrate

It makes sense to plan to move one application at a time, but how do you determine which application you should migrate first?

• Do you need to migrate to a cloud-based application because your local version has performance or security issues?
• Do you want to try the migration process plan from less important applications to adjust for more important applications in the future?
• Do you want to take advantage of new features in cloud-based applications to increase productivity or improve customer experience?

Cloud infrastructure

In the public cloud, the infrastructure is provided as a service. For your IT workload, you need a complete execution stack consisting of servers, operating systems, networks, and storage.

• Does the provider you are considering provide the same operating system, database, and storage as you need?
• Do you need to make some changes to the application code before the migration to the cloud?
• Will you have the possibility to leverage the latest options for serverless technology?

Find your business goals

Although cloud computing looks like an IT decision, it should be a business decision. Before migrating to the cloud, you must ask why your business is migrating to the cloud.

• What is your purpose of moving to the cloud, or what expected benefits does your organization hope to achieve?
• Migrating to the cloud will bring you new markets, opportunities, and can change the way your organization operates. By aligning IT with business goals, your organization can make better use of the benefits of the cloud.

Accessibility

• Do you need your service to be located in one place, or is it distributed all over the world?
• Is the cloud provider able to offer the geographic deployment which you need?

This is important for high availability, in which case the infrastructure can automatically switch the location of the service without disturbing your end user.

Disaster recovery

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) are the two goals of restoring workloads.

• Are you able to set these according to your business needs?
• Considering the location and function of workload resources and data, implement a strategy that meets these goals.

Security

By storing data or running your workloads in the cloud, you lose physical control over the data, which is why cloud infrastructure must be protected against all possible attacks. You should have the option to encrypt data in flight or at rest. When choosing a cloud data migration strategy User/Admin accounts must be isolated from each other, and cross-access must be strictly controlled.

• What does your cloud provider guarantee in terms of security of authentication and authorization?
• When you are moving data to the cloud, do you need to encrypt them?
• How much control will you have over the configuration of security features?
• Will you have enough tools for cloud monitoring?
• Do you understand that there is a shared responsibility between you and your cloud provider?

Ongoing evolvement

Migrating to the cloud is the first step. After that, you need to consider ongoing management and support.

• Do you have the appropriate skills, resources and time to manage your cloud environment?
• You might want to consider whether it can be managed in-house, or can it be outsourced?

Choose your business partners carefully

Not everyone has the same level of knowledge or experience with cloud migration. Find a partner that has the goal of achieving your roadmap for strong value.

The StormIT team understands that there is no universal migration path, from assessing your unique needs and helping you mobilize the right resources, to migrating and modernizing on the cloud faster. StormIT will help you determine the right cloud journey for your organization.

StormIT cloud migration best practices

Working with our experienced team at StormIT, cloud migrations are accomplished quickly and securely without undue business interruption. A lot of risks and problems of cloud migration can be solved by working with a reliable partner with the knowledge and experience needed for a successful migration to the cloud.

Start simple

It is good to start with something simpler to migrate and gradually start to move on to more complex projects. The more your employees adapt to cloud services, and the faster you and your organization will see the benefits, the easier it is to "sell" the vision internally.

Optimize cost

Almost every part of the cloud migration will bring some costs and it’s good to understand thoroughly how every part of the cloud migration can be optimized for minimal costs:

• Rewriting/rebuilding applications in the cloud
• Investing in people and tools needed to migrate successfully
• Training staff on the new systems
• Performance issues including latency, dependencies on on-premises apps, and business interruptions
• Bandwidth and data transfer costs

Solutions lie in the evaluating, analysing and planning of the whole process, and the StormIT team can help you with this.

Automate

To minimize disruption and improve the overall efficiency of the migration, it is important to automate repeated patterns where possible. There are cloud tools that aim to help you automate the migration of virtual machines and data, but also help with the whole process of the migration.

Choose the right application migration strategy

The complexity of cloud migration varies and after years of successful migrations to the public cloud, there is a possibility to choose from 6 common types of application migration strategies. The on-premise to cloud migration strategy should help organizations outline a plan on how they’ll approach migrating each of the applications in their portfolio and in what order. The strategy should be chosen very thoroughly, but it may change over time.

Monitoring after migration

You should monitor cloud usage if you want to avoid wasting your company’s funds. Flexera wrote in their 2020 State of the Cloud Report that waste in public cloud computing is self-estimated by companies to be almost 30 percent. You should understand and be aware of what is happening in your cloud environment; a centralized dashboard that identifies running resources across the cloud can help you out here.

Monitoring for compliance and security is also crucial, and you’ll ideally want to collect logs from apps, systems, and databases to ensure information security requirements are being met. StormIT offers access to the industry-leading Cloud Management Platform – CloudCheckr.

Learn more by reading about the successful migration of Malta's Number One News Website to the AWS Cloud in our case study.

StormIT cloud migration approach and strategy

Where do you start? What should you look for when you’re planning your cloud migration or expansion? There is no prescribed way to migrate to the cloud and every case is different, but we have helped organizations migrate to the cloud with a proven approach to help achieve business objectives faster.

Below is a simple plan of our managed cloud migration:

• Evaluate and explore your on-premises resources to determine your new environment requirements
• Build cloud foundation, address readiness gaps and choose the right cloud data migration strategy
• Track your migration to troubleshoot issues and reduce the effort spent on mitigating risks
• Post-migration monitoring of cloud resources

Below is a more detailed process of our proven strategy. Every step is based on our years of experience and success.

1. Evaluation

At the beginning of your journey we will examine your current readiness for operations in the cloud and get information about your current solution. Most importantly, we can help you determine the business outcomes you need and develop a business case for the migration.

Benefits

• Clear business case and precise outcomes of cloud migration.

2. Plan

In the second step, we create a cloud migration plan, choose the right migration strategy and refine your business case. A creation of a cloud migration project plan starts with a deeper understanding of the dependencies between applications and evaluates migration strategies to meet your objectives. We addressed the gaps in organizational preparations that were discovered during the first phase, focusing on establishing a baseline cloud environment with accounts, improving operational readiness, and developing cloud skills.

Benefits

• Clear picture of current configurations, dependencies and limitations.
• Well-planned cloud migration approach.
• Well-designed account environment.
• Precisely identified gaps in your cloud readiness.
• Simple plan for the development of your cloud skills.

3. Design

In the third stage, we design each application. For many applications, the best process is to quickly migrate to the cloud and then re-architect. That way, we can help you redesign your old system using cloud-native principles and enable you to take full advantage of all the cloud benefits. We create a conversion plan for the next phase.

Benefits

• Usage of cloud-native services instead of legacy systems.
• Architecture with right-sized and optimized resources.

4. Migrate

In the final stage, each application will undergo migration and verification. When migrating to the cloud, you need to iterate on a new basis, shut down the old system, and continue to evolve toward a modern operating model. Your operating model will become a set of agile people, processes and technologies that will continue to improve as you migrate more applications.

Benefits

• Rapid migration process without unnecessary business interruption.
• Testing, quality assurance and project governance.
• Technical debt reduction.
• Access to Cloud Management Platform – CloudCheckr.

Conclusion

Whether you're looking to improve productivity, gain flexibility and scalability, or save on costs, StormIT team is here to help you accelerate your cloud migration. When you migrate to the cloud with us, you get the support you need for a successful, streamlined migration.

StormIT offers control over the whole migration process and consultancy for its every step:

• Cloud Migration, Modernization, and Transformation: Readiness evaluation, business outcomes identification, selection of an appropriate cloud migration methodology and strategy, and evaluation of your specific migration needs.
• Architecture design: Design and deployment of high availability architectures and thorough assessment and security planning, all of which are non-disruptive to your business.
• Cloud Foundation: Tailor-made workshops and best practices guidance.
• Cost Optimization and Enterprise Cloud Management Platform: 24/7 monitoring for under-utilized assets, senior Solution Architect consultancy, and Cloudcheckr platform access.

"Customer service. Simple as that. There are many, many options out there with respect to cloud services and it all more or less looks the same. What stood out with StormIT is consistent, reliable and strong customer service. We feel like a true partner, not a number. That is one of the main reasons why I would very likely recommend StormIT."

Fabien Ricard, CEO Brid Video D.O.O.