Cloud Migration Strategies: Ensuring a Seamless Migration

Is your organization feeling the limitations of maintaining an on-premises IT infrastructure? Or perhaps you already operate in the cloud, but know there is room for improvement, whether that means better cost savings, improved performance,  or leveraging other opportunities for optimization and innovation. Wherever you stand in your cloud journey, SPR can help you to evaluate and optimize your resources for maximum efficiency.

The purpose of a cloud migration strategy is to ensure a smooth transition to the cloud while minimizing risks, downtime, and costs. This doesn’t mean the strategy is merely a structured plan that outlines how an organization moves its digital assets, applications, data, and workloads from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud environment. Your migration strategy should include all of this and still have a larger vision in mind as you make your move into cloud native architectures.

There are a number of reasons a business would decide to migrate to the cloud. These include:

• Cost savings: Reduce expenses on hardware and maintenance while benefiting from pay-as-you-go pricing.
• Scalability: Easily adjust resources to meet demand without major investments.
• Improved Security: Leverage advanced security features like encryption, access controls, and compliance support.
• Disaster Recovery: Ensure data redundancy and recovery options.
• Accessibility and Collaboration: Enable employees to work from anywhere with access to data and applications.
• Performance and Reliability: Utilize high-performance infrastructure with lower latency, redundancy, and global availability.
• Innovation and Agility: Gain access to cloud-native technologies like AI and machine learning.
• Regulatory Compliance: Meet industry regulations with providers that adhere to compliance standards.

A cloud migration strategy will address key concerns with your existing infrastructure as well as your goals for what’s next. To assess your current infrastructure, we recommend a combination of performance benchmarking, security audits, cost analysis, operational reviews, and compliance evaluations. Before you get started, you’ll also want to define your business objectives and select the best cloud model based on what’s most important to you—more on that in the next section.

When it comes to creating a cloud migration strategy, you’ll receive a lot of prescriptive guidance from the major cloud providers and their partners that falls in line with “assess, mobilize, migrate” or “map, plan, and migration.” And while this is very valid language, at SPR we look at things differently because every business has unique needs.

Our pragmatic approach follows a top-down method that’s customized based on our clients’ needs and overall business and product roadmap, and includes three key considerations, beginning with:

Modernize Where Possible: We assess your applications to determine which can be updated to leverage the latest cloud-native architectures.

Then:

Containerize Where Feasible: For applications that can’t be fully modernized, we employ containerization to streamline deployment and scaling.

And finally:

Lift-and-Shift When Necessary: Some workloads require rapid migration; we help rehost these seamlessly without disrupting your operations.

What’s different, then, about our approach is the focus on modernization. Rather than move everything to the cloud and then identify opportunities for optimization and innovation, we consider these from the get, while also looking at how the cloud migration fits into the bigger vision for the business. This ultimately saves time, money, and business disruption in the long run.

In the pre-migration phase, we begin with an inventory that considers not only the ins and outs of a proposed cloud migration, but also how you and your customers currently use your platform day-to-day—what’s working and what could be improved upon. Our goal is to reimagine and enhance your current architecture to build a cloud platform that better serves your users and fosters innovation while achieving business objectives.

Once we’ve conducted a thorough audit of your current IT environment, we partner with you to establish clear objectives for the cloud migration while also considering your short and long-term goals for the business as a whole. If there is an opportunity to modernize, we will leverage it. Modernization forms the foundation of every SPR cloud computing migration strategy.

What we cannot modernize, we’ll containerize. This is where choosing the right cloud model comes into play. There are a number of options including a public cloud model which uses providers like AWS, Azure, or Google; a private cloud model which offers a customized infrastructure; a hybrid model, meaning a combination of public and private; and finally, multi-cloud, which uses multiple cloud providers. Determining factors can include cost, flexibility of the platform, and vendor lock-in, among others.

We also consider the 6 R’s as key components to determining the preferred cloud migration plan as well as the need for lift-and-shift based on workload and time requirements. From there, we develop the migration plan itself, complete with timelines, resource allocation, and risk mitigation to ensure that business disruption is minimized.

During migration, we begin with pilot migrations to test workloads in the cloud. Testing is absolutely critical and typically one of the biggest gaps in an organization. It should not just be a standalone part of the migration; testing plays an integral role in post-migration management and optimization as well. More often than not, our team builds automated or continuous testing into the infrastructure.

Other considerations in post-migration management include continuously optimizing workloads, monitoring costs, and implementing governance policies to maximize cloud benefits, all of which we do alongside our partners to ensure a seamless experience and easy adoption.

For most organizations, a move to the cloud is inevitable for cost savings, better performance, scalability, and to leverage the latest technologies. Migrating to a cloud native architecture and modernizing your workloads provides a larger benefit though. Public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP allow you to remove the overhead of patch management, some of the threat analysis, and redundancy and resiliency buildout considerations you need in your datacenters.  This allows your organization to focus on the things that will allow you to innovate and create better experiences for your customers.

As an AWS advanced partner and Azure solution partner with a 50-year history of delivering application modernization successfully, SPR has the deep expertise, skills, and team to not only complete your migration, but set your organization up for success for years to come.