Cloud Migration

by Preethica Furtado
Cloud migration is the transfer or migration of digital assets from local infrastructure to the cloud, including data movement from one cloud type to another.

What is cloud migration?

Cloud migration is defined as a process of moving a company’s data and business processes from legacy infrastructure to the cloud or in between clouds to better suit requirements. From on-premises to public, private, or hybrid cloud, or between cloud to cloud environments, cloud migration involved the movement of applications and workloads seamlessly.

Understanding the need for cloud migration stems from the usage of legacy infrastructure. A legacy product is an outdated hardware or software system that is still used by companies. Although these products are supported by their vendors in terms of upgrades, software additions, and other features, they are not very efficient. These systems could potentially slow down the business operations.

Legacy hardware infrastructure such as servers, storage, networking equipment are usually situated on the premises of a company. By having all IT infrastructure on-premises, companies are losing out on the numerous benefits that cloud computing has to offer.

Companies are moving non-critical workloads and applications to understand the benefits of cloud computing. Cloud migration software assists firms on their cloud computing journey to begin the transfer of their workloads to the cloud. 

Types of cloud migration

The different types of cloud migration are also known as the “6 R’s” of cloud migration:

  • Rehost or lift and shift: In this type, the software being used remains the same but not in the cloud (applications are “lifted” from legacy infrastructure and “shifted” to the cloud).
  • Replatform or lift and optimize: This type of cloud migration is an extension of the rehost type. In replatform, APIs and OS are optimized during lifting and shifting. Alterations to the code base are minimal.
  • Repurchase or drop and shop: In repurchase, companies identify workloads that are outsourced to SaaS vendors that specialize in similar workloads. This type is dependent on the application and therefore runs on a case-by-case basis.
  • Refactoring: This type is also known as rearchitecting, where legacy applications can be redesigned from scratch to be supported in a cloud environment. The applications are replicated and moved into the cloud.
  • Retain or hybrid model: In this type, a firm identifies that it does not need to move all workloads to the cloud at that point in time, just a few of them. Firms can choose to retain some of their components on IT infrastructure. 
  • Retire: This involves identifying and shutting down those applications that will not cause any impact on efficiency and productivity. 

Benefits of cloud migration

Cloud migration can benefit users in the ways mentioned below:

  • Helps combine and deploy data: Cloud migration software can combine data from various sources within the enterprise and move this data to the cloud data center selected. This ensures that data from different sources are preserved, and all required data sources are moved to the cloud.
  • Speeds up application deployment: One of the benefits of cloud migration is the support it provides organizations to speed up application deployment. Since there is no need for on-premises infrastructure, businesses can skip steps such as purchasing the right servers and maintaining uptime or downtime of data centers, and directly work on their applications in the cloud.
  • Helps develop a migration hub: Cloud migration tools also support the creation of a hub. This hub acts as a central point for different stakeholders to start, execute, and track the migration activity.
  • Provides security support: Cloud migration software ensures that stringent security measures are put in place to ensure that data, processes, systems, and other applications being migrated are safeguarded during the migration process.
  • Assists with planning and analysis: Several cloud migration tools can now analyze business data and suggest best practices to deploy and organize it. The tool can be used to plan, analyze, and derive cloud cost models, to support data-driven and well-informed business decisions.
  • Ensures backup and recovery: Several cloud migration software offer the benefit of data backup and recovery. During the migration procedure, there is a chance that secure data could be lost in case of a fault. Cloud migration tools offer this feature to ensure the smooth migration of data onto the cloud.

Cloud migration best practices

Some of the best practices that should be followed when undertaking a cloud migration plan are as follows:

  • Define goals: Understanding company goals and linking them to cloud migration strategy is of the essence. These goals should help answer big concerns such as why the organization needs a cloud migration strategy, its benefits from migrating to the cloud, and the mix of workloads being migrated.
  • Invest in cybersecurity: An essential best practice is to invest in cybersecurity to ensure a company’s data is safe. When workloads are being migrated to the cloud, a safe and secure plan has to be in place to prevent hacks and data breaches. This is because on-premises security differs significantly from cloud security. Deploying a web application firewall or a cloud firewall is a necessary practice.
  • Replicate the database: In this practice, databases are replicated throughout the database migration process so that the data is up to date till its last version. Replicating a database ensures that in case of any fault, the data available is the latest version, and there is no loss of essential data.
  • Switch production: Firms should move any final workloads, processes to the cloud. Once all the applications and workloads have been moved, the cloud goes live. This marks the end of the migration process.

Cloud migration discussions on G2

Preethica Furtado
PF

Preethica Furtado

Preethica is a Market Research Manager and Senior Market Research Analyst at G2 focused on the data and cloud management space. Prior to joining G2, Preethica spent three years in market research for enterprise systems, cloud forecasting, and workstations. She has written research reports for both the semiconductor and telecommunication industries. Her interest in technology led her to combine that with building a challenging career. She enjoys reading, writing blogs and poems, and traveling in her free time.

Cloud Migration Software

This list shows the top software that mention cloud migration most on G2.

Rapid application portfolio analysis. Automated source code analysis of hundreds of applications in a week for Cloud Readiness, Open Source risks, Resiliency, Agility. Objective software insights combined with qualitative surveys for business context.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART) helps organizations of all sizes develop efficient and effective plans for cloud adoption and enterprise cloud migrations.

SaaS-based file migration to popular cloud services

Cutover’s comprehensive and intuitive Collaborative Automation SaaS platform enables enterprises to simplify complex and unpredictable technology operational processes with dynamic automated runbooks, real-time visibility, regulatory audit logs and vast integration and API functionality. Avoid human error, increase automation, increase capacity and reduce manual work with Cutover.

Prodly DevOps automates low-code application development empowering non-developers to configure, test and deploy Salesforce low code applications. Customers have found increased efficiency and faster time to value when using Prodly DevOps to implement and deploy Salesforce CPQ, Salesforce Billing, Field Service Lighting, and Salesforce B2B Commerce. With Prodly DevOps, you can implement and update the Salesforce apps your organization depends on. A complicated, repetitive task that would otherwise take one of your most skilled Salesforce developers about half a week is done in just a few minutes.

AWS Elemental MediaPackage reliably prepares and protects your video for delivery over the Internet. From a single video input, AWS Elemental MediaPackage creates video streams formatted to play on connected TVs, mobile phones, computers, tablets, and game consoles.

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

With Faddom you gain granular visibility of your entire IT environment, mapping your application, networks and dependencies in real-time. Uniquely, Faddom works without credentials, firewalls or agents. Our smart solution is completely platform-agnostic and has limitless use-cases from cloud migration to cost optimization.

Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) is a replication and recovery solution that makes disaster recovery simple and scalable from private, hybrid and to public clouds, maintain IT resilience as infrastructure evolves with hypervisor-based replication of VM block-level changes, from any storage to any storage, between VMware vSphere versions and cross-hypervisor for on premise datacenters or the utilize the cloud for Disaster Recovery as a Service.

Compute Engine enables you to create and run large-scale workloads on virtual machines hosted on Google Cloud. Get running quickly with pre-built and ready-to-go configurations or create machines of your own with the optimal amount of vCPU and memory required for your workload.

Cloudsfer offers you cloud data migration solutions for migrating users, copying file storage, cloud sync service and backing up your files anywhere. Cloudsfer is easy to use, cost effective, secure, and has a 24/7 support team available to assist you when needed.

Help Desk Migration is a service that allows to move data from one platform to another.

LogicMonitor is the SaaS-based, automated performance monitoring platform that provides agile IT Ops teams with the visibility and actionable metrics they need to ensure the availability of services and applications running on complex and distributed infrastructure.

Infocrossing, Inc. (Nasdaq: IFOX) is a premier provider of a full range of IT outsourcing services, including mainframe outsourcing, midrange and open systems management, business continuity services, and IT infrastructure consulting.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define.

Automated migration solution utilizes block-level continuous replication, application stack orchestration, and automated machine conversion to ensure 100% data integrity. Whether you are migrating to, across, or within clouds, CloudEndure Live Migration gives you the flexibility and security enterprises need to succeed in today's fast-paced digital ecosystem.

CloudConnexa provides secure communication between an organization’s distributed workforce, IoT/IIoT devices, and the online services they rely on daily with a secure virtualized network, based on the market-proven OpenVPN protocol. Get started with 3 free connections.

Exalate is the most complete & flexible synchronization tool on the planet for issue trackers and task management systems. Exalate is available for JIRA Server, JIRA Cloud and HP/QC ALM. Synchronising is unlimited between any of these platforms as long as each instance has a valid Exalate License.

Morpheus is the DevOps for Enterprise IT, allowing IT and technology leaders to save time, money and sanity by providing automatic logging, monitoring, alerts, one-click provisioning and more. Morpheus also solves common IT headaches like Shadow IT, cloud-lock, and impossible cloud migration.