By now we all know the advantages of the cloud: you can access IT services without the need to buy, maintain, and manage hardware or dedicate employees to low-level hardware maintenance. And with scarce IT resources, it’s more important than ever to have ready-to-go IT services at your fingertips.
The cloud boosts efficiency and helps you achieve maximum results with minimal expense. For organizations that pull off a successful cloud migration, rewards can include increased scalability and agility, lower costs, and improved security.
With a public cloud service such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS), employees don’t have to spend time on tedious hardware maintenance that doesn’t directly contribute to business objectives. Instead, your tech wizards can focus on driving business outcomes.
Planning a Cloud Migration
Without the right strategy, you can hurt your chances of achieving your desired cloud benefits. There are many common mistakes when companies go cloud, and a botched migration can hamper performance and increase costs. It’s regularly reported that more than half of companies don’t see the cloud benefits they expected¹. This is generally due to faults in migration strategy and a lack of the necessary cloud talent.
Here are the three fundamentals to consider no matter what type of cloud and which cloud service models you’ll use:
- What you're moving
- Why you're moving it
- How you're going to use it
At a more detailed level, it’s all about figuring out the migration process and giving plenty of thought to planning.
Three Approaches to Cloud Migration
Our experts tailor their cloud migration approach to fit each client’s needs. It typically involves a mixture of these three approaches:
- Lift and Shift
- Modernization
- Replacement by a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Lift and Shift
Also called a re-host or re-platform, lift and shift is the quickest way to get to the cloud. It works well when a few modifications are needed, and it is less expensive in the short term (although long-term it can be more expensive). The disadvantages with lift and shift are you are not using the full advantages of the cloud, such as elasticity and the ability to scale quickly. There can be problems with latency or performance if the app was not intended for the cloud. It can be easy to lift and shift one app to the cloud, but it can be tricky if the app consumes data from other systems. The good news is even if you have made a lift and shift, applications are easier to rework and optimize once they’re running in the cloud.
Modernization
Modernization takes full advantage of cloud computing and opens possibilities for more cloud services and offerings. By modernizing your apps and introducing containerization, you can easily move your app from one vendor to another in a cloud-to-cloud migration. Modernization sometimes means rebuilding your workload from scratch to be “cloud-native.” It takes an investment in time and skills development (particularly reskilling and upskilling your existing talent), but it pays off by giving you the maximum benefits available in the cloud.
Replacement SaaS
Replacement is the strategy that involves replacing a hard-to-migrate application with a new SaaS solution. The difficulties that you may encounter with this strategy are finding an application with the right set of features for your requirements and the effort to migrate live data.
We can help you determine which approach is best for your organization! Contact us at sales@alithya.com to schedule a consultation.