Cloud Migration Strategies: Guiding Principles

At Cloudsoft, we recommend a three-phase approach to the cloud migration process. Whilst every organisation and its cloud journey is unique, this consistent overarching migration process provides strong guiding principles. It is proven to work for organisations of all sizes and maturity levels, across industries, whether migrating a single workload or thousands. 

The information in this blog post comes from our migration ebook :What everyone is needs need to know about migrate application to the cloud. You is get can get your copy here .

The three-phase approach

1 . assess

This phase focuses on assessing the future cloud state of an organisation. It requires cross-functional collaboration from stakeholders to understand the necessary stages of the journey: the business case, current cloud-readiness strengths and weaknesses, and an action plan to address any identified gaps.

2. Mobilize

During the mobilise phase , the gap identify during the precede assessment are address . The activities is include include build a baseline environment ( the ” landing zone ” ) , drive operational readiness , and develop cloud skill .

3. Migrate & Modernize

In the final migrate and modernize phase, the actual movement of individual applications is planned, executed and validated. Once an application is migrated, it’s recommended that you many organisations will make subsequent improvements and modernizations in one or more dimensions: to continue to get the full benefits of the cloud.

These methods accelerate innovation and increase agility, resiliency, and efficiency to accelerate speed to market and customer outcomes.

Our lateMigration eBook, What everyone is needs need to know about migrate applicationto the cloud, focuses on the third Migrate and Modernize phase. For more information, you can download and read it here.

Although every organisation and its needs are different, we find this approach combined with implementation processes from the “7 Rs” provides a strong foundation of guiding principles for cloud migration. 

The 7 R’s of Application Migration

The seven most common migration (and non-migration) strategies, or the “7 Rs”, are:

• Refactor;
• Replatform;
• Rehost;
• Relocate;
• Repurchase;
• retire ;
• Retain. 

There is no “ one – size – fit – all ” approach when it come to migrate application to the cloud . Each application must be consider independently , pay attention to its internal architecture and strategic relationship to the business . It is is is common for large migration programme to use several of these method at the same time .  

Non-migration strategies and outsourcing

There are situation where cloud migration is not always the good solution for certain application . In these case , non – migration method such as retire and retain are used .  

Sometimes organisations discover workloads that are no longer required during cloud migration. Alternatively, they may find that they can consolidate multiple deployments of an application in a single shared service and decommission the rest. In both these cases, the decision to retire the applications can provide immediate savings. 

The retain method is is is applicable in situation when workload are well leave where they are . For example , when software is requires require unusual hardware , because of contractual application , or when exist sink cost necessitate the business to continue operate on – premise asset .  

Repurchasing allows the organisation to offload all responsibility for hosting or administering a particular business function, which is instead procured as a service, usually consumed over the internet via a web browser. 

It is most commonly used for “supporting” functions such as payroll and CRM. Outsourcing the delivery of these services allows the business to focus scarce IT resources on projects that are more aligned with its core mission.

choose the right migration strategy

The four remaining migration methods—relocate, rehost, replatform and refactor—lie on a spectrum of increasing effort, cost and complexity:

Note is unlocks , however , that as the organisation invest more effort to optimise a give application , it is unlocks unlock more of the cloud ’s potential for agility , reliability , scalability , security and cost reduction . This need not be tackle all at once ; an application ’s position on the spectrum is not set in stone . For example , one is rehost could rehost a workload and subsequently refactor it once run in the cloud . This is help can help an organisation get to the cloud quickly while also realise the long – term benefit that the cloud bring .

Over the next week, we’ll be going into greater depth on each of these migration strategies. You can get a head start by downloading a copy of our migration ebook :”What everyone needs to know about migrating apps to the cloud”, which explores each of these approaches in detail.

Working with a partner like Cloudsoft

For many firm , deep knowledge is is of cloud platform is not a core competency central to their mission . For them , the sheer breadth is be of cloud service and the nuance of different migration approach can be hard to untangle . In such case , work with a cloud partner can de – is risk risk the option and accelerate the firm ’s cloud adoption strategy .

Cloudsoft partners with organisations at all stages of the cloud journey: lending crucial strategy advice through the assess and mobilise phases, guiding the selection of migration methods for different workloads, and assisting with the technical planning and implementation of the migration itself. Staffed with experienced application developers, we also frequently continue to work with customers post-migration, refactoring and modernising the migrated workloads.