As we move ahead in time, we can also see the growth of Cloud Market and that it has become a key element for all the business sizes to deliver IT services. Companies need agile, flexible & secure IT systems, which will help them, get rid of the highly expensive on- premise infrastructures.
But before anything, the thought of Cloud Migration only starts raising infinite number of questions in our minds.
Here are 4 questions of cloud migration that every company might have:
1) Which applications should move to the cloud first?
Before answering this question, there are a few suggestions that can be taken care of while moving to Cloud:
- Companies should be a little cautious when Inter Region Communication of Applications is necessary between private IPs. It is difficult to move such applications without VPN.
- Applications like Web Portal, Static Websites, JAVA based Applications etc. can be readily migrated on Cloud.
- Stateless apps can also be easily migrated.
Moving ahead, these are the applications that should move to the Cloud first:
- Development & Test Applications should move first as they are less critical and one can power them out when not needed. One can also spin a new de elopement environment in minutes.
- Then the non-critical business applications should move to the Cloud.
- Next in the queue will be all the applications that are heavy in terms of size like Data Warehouses.
- Moving on, the Companies should move scalable apps & applications resilience in the cloud depending on their website traffic as well as nature of the business.
- After this those applications can be moved to the cloud that is permitted by compliance to be migrated.
Though this a standard sequence of Cloud Migration followed by most of the organizations but it may vary according to company’s use cases.
2) Does the cloud provide all of the infrastructure building blocks we require?
Yes, cloud provides multiple configurations for the following as building blocks along with software licenses in a pay as you go mode but the availability would vary from one cloud provider to another.
- Compute
- Storage
- Network & Network Management
- Database
- Data Warehouse Solutions
- Load Balancing Solutions
- Clustering Solutions
- Monitoring Solutions
- DNS Solutions
- Infrastructure Management Automation Solutions
- CDN
You can also install any software on the cloud provided the underlying OS and other resources support the software.
3) What are different Migration Approaches?
There are 4 migration approaches:
- Lift & shift- Also known as “Fork Lifting”, it is a method in which systems are moved from their current location to a cloud provider to replicate the architecture or configuration.
- VM Import Export- This enables you to import virtual machine images from the existing environment to Amazon EC2 instances. VM Import Export is somewhat similar to Fork Lifting but requires a VMDK format to migrate.
- Changing application to enable it for Cloud properties like elasticity and fault-tolerance.
- Re-engineering to enable applications for Cloud.
4) Can I migrate my entire Infrastructure to the Cloud?
Yes you can, provided-
- There are no compliance issues like HIPAA, PCI DSS and compliance issues specific to Health Care, Finance and Defense Industries.
- The required region is supported by Cloud Vendors.
- There are softwares matching the same configurations as that of the in-house infrastructure devices.
- Your application is not decoupled as tightly coupled apps do not prove to be much of a benefit.
- Any of the Applications are not running on specific programs like SOLARIS.
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