Businesses across the globe are replacing legacy, on-premises technology with cloud technologies and infrastructure to reduce cost, scale, and accelerate innovations. With small, medium, and large enterprises moving operations to the cloud and adopting online productivity and collaboration solutions, the adaption and migration to the cloud have significantly soared since the COVID-19 crisis. Based on a recent report by Markets and Markets, the global cloud computing market size would grow from USD 445.3 billion in 2021 to USD 947.3 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 16.3%.

In short, the Cloud is the on-demand delivery of computing services over the internet such as servers, networking, databases, storage, and software for faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. The following are some of the key reasons organizations typically migrate to the cloud.

• Reduced IT costs
• Scale business operations
• Accelerate Innovations
• Improve Security
• Leverage new technologies
• Enable digital transformation

In this blog post, we shall cover in detail what is cloud migration, cloud migration strategy types and key challenges in cloud migration.

What is Cloud Migration?

In general, Cloud Migration is the process of moving digital assets such as data, workloads, IT resources, and applications from old, legacy infrastructure or an on-premises data center to the cloud. Cloud Migration might also involve moving data and applications from one cloud platform or provider to another, and termed cloud-to-cloud migration.

Types of Cloud Migration Strategies

Cloud Migration can at times be an immensely complex and expensive process. And it must align with the technical, functional, and operational needs of the organization. A successful migration strategy should address short-term goals like reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and long-term goals such as agility and alignment with business objectives. The following are the three prevalent Cloud Migration Strategies.

Rehost or Lift & Shift

Rehosting is simply moving a copy of the existing application to cloud infrastructure with no significant architectural change to the servers or the application. It is typically adopted by organizations just starting their migration journey, as it is a relatively fast and inexpensive way to migrate applications from on-premises to a public or private cloud.

Replatforming or Move & Improve

In replatforming, instead of just lifting and shifting the workloads to the cloud, the application is slightly modified to take advantage of the new cloud infrastructure for better performance. For example, replacing a self-hosted DB Servers with a managed DB hosted by the cloud provider during migration. This strategy help organization to gain experience in the cloud while minimizing disruption to their existing systems.

Refactoring or Rip & Replace

The refactoring, aka re-architecting strategy, involves the complete rebuilding of the applications and workload from scratch using cloud-native components. Refactoring is much more complex than other cloud migration approaches, as it involves substantial code changes and the adoption of cloud-native features to ensure better resource utilization in the cloud. Though refactoring is the most time and resource-intensive strategy, it can provide a higher ROI once entirely migrated.

Common Cloud Migration Challenges

Though every organization’s business objectives are unique, thus their strategies for cloud migration, most still face some of the following common challenges.

Lack of clear migration strategy

A well-prepared migration strategy is a critical factor contributing to the success of any cloud migration. It is crucial to understand the entire IT ecosystem of the organization and identify all the digital assets that need to be migrated to the cloud and their cloud readiness. This analysis helps determine which cloud migration strategy is the most appropriate and helps easily navigate the transition and avoid analysis paralysis during later stages.

Lack of capability

Lack of internal capabilities and skills is one of the primary challenges concerning cloud migration. It requires upskilling the existing workforce, especially for an organization using legacy technologies and architecture. This capabilities gap results in many organizations spending enormous budgets training their employees. One of the best ways to bridge this gap is to partner with a cloud management partner like TekIntelligence to help through extended teams in the initial phases, while the in-house team up-skills collaborating with the partner.

Managing migration Cost

Cloud migration might land as a significant contributor to the costing issues if not aligned with business requirements. Though the cloud services would reduce costs in the medium and long term, organizations should be mindful about initial investments for the cloud migration process. Lack of skills, inadequate assessment, and wrong migration strategy are the major factors contributing to higher migration costs. Collaborating with the right cloud partner could help you in devising the right migration strategy and identifying apt cloud platforms and services that keep migration costs in control.

Cloud adoptability

Organizations, particularly large enterprises, are typically rigid and have resistance to adapting to changes. Such organizations often face challenges with cloud migration as well. Solving this starts with making the senior stakeholders cognizant about cloud technologies and benefits and establishing an organization-wide cloud policy. The policy should cover critical aspects such as Authority, Control procedures, and Funding that would help cooperation and collaboration across the teams to implement the cloud migration strategy.

TekIntelligence is one of the preferred cloud partners for many organizations. We have helped numerous customers adopt digitalization by leveraging Cloud Computing and solve their business problems by building secure, scalable, flexible, and reliable digital solutions on the cloud.