Moving digital assets like data, workloads, IT, resources, or applications takes a level of care and consideration that will allow your business to seamlessly migrate existing infrastructure without sacrificing customer experience or negatively impacting your bottom line.
If your business is ready to expand while working within an existing infrastructure, cloud migration is a solution. And while this generally refers to moving tools and data from legacy systems or on-premises data centers to the cloud, the fundamentals of this process are defined by the industry and service to keep your business secure while mitigating lost productivity or creating costly mistakes that can continue to haunt you.
Begin with a Strategic Vision
Do you have a strategy? Lacking a clear strategy could spell cloud sprawl or a breakdown of properly monitoring and managing individual cloud instances. The biggest threat to your business is not having a clear understanding of your data environment and security weaknesses. Even human error could easily derail your company’s efforts to move cloud-based infrastructure to a service provider.
The 7Rs of Cloud Migration to Optimize Your Business
These seven strategies for cloud migration can be used in combination or independently when considering your IT portfolio; choosing the best option for your enterprise requires understanding the complexity of applications in your business.
1) Retire
After a comprehensive discovery of an IT environment is performed, there are often elements of an enterprise portfolio that are redundant, have been replaced by other software or are no longer in use. Retiring or decommissioning these elements means a boost in savings by no longer needing to run and maintain them.
2) Retain
This means doing nothing and choosing to revisit products that do not have cloud capabilities or those that will continue to run on your premises. Accept this limitation and move forward when your business has more experience.
3) Relocate
If possible, when code and functionality changes are not applicable and for ease of management and cost savings, move an application to the cloud without making any changes or purchasing new hardware.
4) Rehost
When an application shifts from a dedicated IT environment into a shared one, this is also known as ‘lift and shift.’ It’s a quick solution that adds significant operational cost savings and often requires very little refactoring (i.e., rebuilding your workload from scratch).
5) Repurchase
Also known as ‘shop and drop’ or ‘drop and shop.’ A stubborn legacy application that won’t move might be looking for a COTS or commercial off-the-shelf software that’s available for purchase. Moving SaaS (Software as a Service) can turn a simple software investment into a costly move.
6) Replatform
Lift, tinker and shift. Make changes where you can. This can mean new code, or security and functionality fixes where applicable. Core application architecture will not change in replatform strategy.
7) Refactor
It may be necessary to refactor or ‘decouple and rewrite for cloud’ (or ‘rip and replace,’ as they say) to rebuild from scratch to be cloud-native. Restructuring an application that is underperforming to take advantage of cloud-native features and align with business goals is a great reason to migrate to the cloud.
Cloud Migration Might Be The Biggest (and Best) Move You’ll Make
Are you ready to talk about the best cloud migration option for your business? Reach out to Nettology today and schedule a consultation with one of our IT experts!
