Key Considerations for a Successful Application Migration

Cloud migration is no longer a buzzword as organizations are well aware of the benefits of leveraging the cloud. Here are some insights from the 2016 State of IT Report, published by Salesforce Research that emphasize the importance of cloud adoption and migration.

68% of CIOs predict they will spend more on mobile applications, cloud migration and security in the next two years.
63% of Companies Operating In the Cloud Can Develop an App in 3 Months Or Less

Digital has transformed the way consumers interact with businesses and make purchasing decisions. Therefore, there is a higher focus on customer-driven apps. Moreover, customers expect great digital user experiences that are powered by intuitive, and differential mobile applications. In most cases application migration becomes inevitable. A business may require an application to migrate to a suitable cloud platform or migrate an entire application infrastructure to a cloud due to high infrastructure costs, disaster recovery, system upgrades or flexibility and scalability requirements. Whatever the case may be, it requires careful planning to achieve successful application infrastructure migration.

The migration planning process will involve determining what business objectives are driving migration such as – Why do you need to migrate? Do you want to pay 30% less per solution or you want to increase your go-to-market speed by 50%? Once you have, defined the business objectives, the next step would be to examine the existing and destination physical architecture and make a list of applications, websites, databases or services that require migration to the cloud.

Here are 4 key considerations to keep in mind while migrating applications:

1. Choosing the Right Cloud Vendor

Recently Amazon has announced price cuts on AWS S3 Standard Storage and Glacier storage services. While, on the other hand, Google too has recently announced a complete overhaul of the storage options available to customers with new storage tiers and reduced pricing. With so much of hustle every vendor would put forth their case actively making it difficult for you to decide.
It is good to start by calculating the application’s current cost of operations, whether it is a physical data center or a cloud. If the cost of operations is getting reduced after the migration, it would be an encouragement for the owner to migrate the services. Apart from cost, business support and Service Level Agreements are an important consideration as every cloud provider has limits.

2. Type of Cloud

There are currently three cloud models available in the market – Private, Public, and Hybrid. In a private cloud, the buyer owns the infrastructure and has a direct control on data which makes it a highly secure option as compared to other clouds. However, the cost of staffing and maintenance of infrastructure is borne by the owner that usually costs more. Public clouds are best suited for enterprises as they provide scalability and high availability while the infrastructure is managed by the provider. A Hybrid is an option that provides a combination of benefits from both public and private such as while data sensitive workloads can run on a private cloud, hybrid gives you an opportunity to run less critical workloads on a public cloud.

3. Hardware Dependability

If you are managing an in-house data center, you need to ensure that the processors, RAMs, Data Disks, etc. are all up to date with the latest technology. Moreover, replacing a hardware component hampers the running services and even the cost of replacing a faulty hardware has to be borne by the owner. In such a case, migrating to a cloud will help in running the applications seamlessly as the hardware is managed and operated by the cloud service provider. The service provider ensures the hardware is up to date and is responsible for maintaining the same. However, there can be still some applications that access your business critical information or sensitive data that you want to host on an owned data center.

4. Accessing Destination Server Architecture

Migration can be a truly lucrative option, but for it to be successful careful planning is imperative. This involves analyzing the destination server environment and fine tuning it before starting your migration. Your plan should consider the type of applications you are moving to the cloud and any unique business requirements that exist. Usually, the requirements at destination server are as per the level of service you need. These could be scalability and elasticity needs, compliance standards and primarily the business objectives that you aim to achieve.

Migration is not just a forklift operation whether it is between physical assets or to the cloud. It requires trusted partner who has an effective Cloud DevOps team and a proven AWS migration services expertise to accelerate your migration process and seamlessly migrate workload between two clouds or from any existing cloud platform or in-premise or co-located data center to a destination server. Here is a comprehensive white paper that suggests a Roadmap to a successful application infrastructure migration and it also provides a checklist to refer to before starting the migration process.