The Ultimate guide to choosing the right cloud migration service provider for your business

Introduction to Cloud Migration

In 2023, the value of the Cloud computing market was touching $600 billion and is expected to quadruple to touch ~$2300 billion by 2032. The growth is not only driven by cloud-born businesses but by far the existing large legacy enterprises that are actively in action to migrate their existing infrastructure to the Cloud. The growth is not only driven by cloud-born businesses but by far the existing large legacy enterprises that are actively in action to migrate their existing infrastructure to the Cloud.

Leading Cloud Providers have launched different flavors of specialized cloud migration services to accommodate the diverse needs of Enterprises. Since the majority of the Enterprise space is vendor-driven, they count on trusted partners, which in this case could be cloud migration consultants or cloud migration partners to assist them through this transformation.

Importance of Selecting the Right Cloud Migration Service Provider

Although some of the Enterprises have in-house capability to perform migration, yet they need guidance for some complex cases where cloud migration consulting services could be utilized.  Enterprises with no technical expertise generally outsource this task to the cloud migration companies. It is critical to choose the right cloud migration service providers, considering their ability to understand existing legacy system constraints as well as from the compliance, delivery, and trust perspective.

Multiple cloud based providers are available in the market, such as AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Linode etc. Some of the cloud infrastructure providers deal with only specific services such as Storage, Database, PaaS etc. The answer to the questions i.e.

• how to choose a cloud service provider? Or
• what to consider when choosing a cloud provider

will be covered in the next sections.

However, organizations can either opt for cloud migration companies that can help evaluate a cloud provider or organizations can leverage their existing partnerships to select a cloud provider that aligns with their business strategy.

What is Cloud Migration

Migration means the movement from one place to another. In the context with IT infrastructure, the movement is for digital assets such as data, applications, workloads  etc. Cloud migration today is commonly used when the destination of movement of IT infrastructure is Cloud.

Let’s first quickly highlight the key benefits of Cloud migration:

Business-led Benefits of Cloud Migration

• Cloud brings in Malleability and Ductility:
  • Malleable, as it can be restructured and reconfigured as per the business dynamics requiring redesigning, scaling to multiple geographies.
  • Ductile, as it can be gracefully stretched from the lightweight compute needs an ultra-large scale to handle millions of transactions/sec.
• Cloud is Always-on:
  Cloud is highly available, ensuring workload is responsive and performant, across time zones by providing distributed architecture, automated fail-overs to redundant zones during failures.
• Cloud is Secure and Compliant:
  Cloud, by default offers enterprise grade security – covering all encryption and IAM use-cases .Compliance is a shared responsibility where Providers ensure the Infrastructure compliance whereas consumers need to ensure the workload compliance.
• Cloud is Cost-conscious:
  Cloud follows a pay-as-you-go model, and its procurement cycle is as short.
• Cloud Unlocks Innovation Velocity
  Cloud offers Infrastructure agility where clusters, DBs, CICD/pipeline set ups take only a few minutes.

This can go on and on as the cloud comes with universal benefits and some well-known, others only discovered along the journey.

Key Components of a Cloud Migration Strategy

Cloud migrations are a complex process and if not planned and executed thoroughly, might encounter time slippages, Runaway costs and Mental Strain.

A well-structured approach helps reduce the complexity for smoother executions.

1. Assessment and Discovery
   • Fetch All Inventory: Catalog all known existing workload: servers, applications, databases, third parties.
   • Map the Dependencies : Understand and document dependencies across workloads and with third parties.
   • Identify Paint Points : Latency, Downtime, Performance etc- highlight bottle-necks so they can be addressed during the migration.
   • Align Stakeholders : Align all concerned teams such as business, Ops, security etc so all input are captured and goals- are aligned.
2. Migration Planning
   • Check Technical Readiness: Categorize workloads based on Cloud-readiness, need for modernization and planned retirement.
   • Map the Migration Approach: Choose the best migration strategy per workload:
     • Retain: Stays on-permise.
     • Rehosting: “Lift and shift”.
     • Replatforming: Minor cloud optimizations.
     • Refactoring: Major redesign for cloud-native.
     • Repurchasing: Replace with SaaS.
     • Retiring: Not more required.
   • Analyze Business Impact: Prioritize workloads based on Business criticality.
   • Phased Execution: Decide order and do migration in phases with clear timelines/milestones.
   • Tool & Platform Selection: Select appropriate application migration services and tools and cloud platforms.
   • Cost & Performance Modeling: Model TCO, calculate ROI, right-size cloud resources.
   • Security and Compliance Readiness: Plan security processes and ensure regulatory compliance.
   • Rollback Plan & Communication: Provision rollback plan and align relevant stakeholders.
3. Pilot Migration
   • Select Pilot workload:  Choose a low-risk workload capable of providing real insights.
   • Simulate and Validate: Do performance testing, failovers, integrations, custom-scripts, validate monitor/logging etc.
   • Benchmark Performance: Compare performance with existing infra, take feedback and incorporate and reiterate until reached optimal outputs.
4. Full-scale Migration and Optimization
   • Phased Rollout: Migrate in prioritized batches to minimize risk, faster feedback.
   • Incorporate Automation: Utilize IaC, CI/CD, cloud migration tools etc.
   • Post-migration Validation: Validate functioning, data integrity, performance etc. Optimize workloads for cloud-native efficiency.
   • Continuous improvement: Monitor key metrics (usage, cost, performance), fine-tune workloads, and iterate proactively.
5. Training and Change Management
   • Documentation, Runbooks and Team Enablement: Create setup documentation, runbooks, FAQs, train cross-functional teams.
   • Feedback Loops: Create open channels for teams to report issues, share ideas, and continuously improve.

Key Factors to Consider When Choosing a Cloud Migration Service Provider

Selecting the right partner – whether from specialized cloud professional services firms or top cloud migration companies – is a crucial decision that can define the outcome to make it a strategic business advantage or a costly misstep.

Consider these key factors to evaluate a cloud migration services company:

1. Experience and Track Record: Proven capability reduces risk, instills confidence.
2. End-to-End Services: Consider E2E cloud migration services offerings to holistically cover the entire lifecycle: assessment, planning, execution, optimization, support and training.
3. Tooling and Automation: Top cloud migration companies have specialized migration tools to automate migration processes to save time,effort and reduce human error.
4. Security, Compliance & Governance: Ensure alignment with Organisations’ security and regulatory requirements( GDPR, HIPAA etc).
5. DevOps, and Change Enablement:
   • Look for offerings such as DevOps consulting services, integrating CI/CD, IaaC and agile methodology.
   • Support for re-architecting of the workloads with microservices where needed.
6. Support, Scalability, Customization and Future Vision: Assess if the provider is able to
   • synchronize with our business’s expansion plans – regional/global etc.
   • customize their cloud migration solutions as per our use cases.
   • provide training and support post migration.
7. Cost Transparency and Business Alignment: Provider can:
   • model TCO and forecast ROI, be transparent with costings.
   • Incorporate cost optimization techniques.

Evaluating Potential Service Providers

This long-term strategic alliance influences the organization’s future so it is critical how you evaluate the partner.

Along with following a general approach of:

• going into discussion with multiple vendors,
• defining evaluation criterion based on different factors,
• scoring providers against each criterion and
• validate the Proposal for all discussion items, processes, SLAs, escalations matrix etc.

Organization are encouraged to follow business refined approach to make right decision:

Step 1: Vision Alignment

• Vendors should not focus only on technical deliverables but align with business outcomes.
• The service portfolio should align strategically

Step 2: Capability Validation : Though partnerships and certification are important,

• Ask/Inquire for:
  • Migration blueprints, case studies, cloud migration plan templates etc.
  • domain-specific projects, specialization as per current workload.
  • the best cloud migration tools or proprietary tools employed for different use-cases.
  • Leverage AWS, Azure or GCP partner certified cloud migration companies.
  • Post-migration support can be provided by Providers with Cloud managed services capability.
  • Expert partners proactively talk about embedding cloud application migration best practices into the Application landscape.

Step 3: Real Customer Insights over sales demos

• Request for previous client references.
• Ask for unsuccessful scenarios/pitfalls faced and how they handled it.

Step 4: Stress-test the Proposal

• Scrutinize SLAs for realistic guarantees. Validate Pilot step, rollback, DR, Cost modelling is mentioned clearly.
• The overall tone should be future proof and futuristic.

Case Studies: Successful Cloud Migrations

• Migrated leading Legal-Tech company’s monolithic architecture from DC to AWS ECS microservices.
• Set up a parallel datacenter on AWS including ETL systems for a Global Ad-tech company.
• E2E migration from Datacenter to AWS of a leading Travel company, including databases etc.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Professional cloud migration companies can early recognize common pitfalls that can save time, effort and cost.

• Failing to adopt cloud-native principles stalls you on the backfoot in the long term.
• Starting execution without Discovery and Assessment will actually cause significant delays.
• Misunderstanding shared responsibility model of cloud can introduce critical security gaps, missed compliances.
• Trusting only on Sales Demos can lead to delays, over-budget and incompletion.

Conclusion

Considering the criticality of cloud migration today, choosing a partner who aligns with business goals and stays committed and flexible as the need evolves is essential.