Does a cloud hang over your business? Or, maybe you’re vice versa on cloud nine because of its popularity? Whichever your answer is, if you’re a business owner or one in the making, you’ve definitely thought about clouds. Not the clouds floating over your house but the clouds whose global market exceeded approximately $330 billion in 2020.
In today’s world cloud migrations have become a necessity rather than a vogue. According to a cloud transformation survey, 90% of surveyed organizations use some type of cloud service. If you’re still not, go on reading.
Cloud migration is the procedure of moving a part of all digital operations to the cloud. The procedure can be compared with moving from a smaller apartment to a bigger one. The only difference is that instead of packing up furniture and clothes, data, applications, and IT processes are packed up and moved. Similarly to moving a flat, cloud migration requires a lot of planning, advanced security, and hard work, but usually it greatly pays off, resulting in many advantages:
- Agility and scalability
Gratefully to cloud migration, companies get the ability to drastically reshape their infrastructure and workloads. The cloud empowers you to control the resources based on your individual business needs.
- Enhanced security
If a cloud migration is done in the right way, it’s much more secure than traditional network systems. No matter what happens to the equipment, the data is still accessible from any part of the world. What is more, the majority of cloud providers offer a range of built-in security features to keep the data safe.
- Reduced costs
Moving to the cloud, you not only reduce the operational costs of your business but also can forget about maintaining expensive data centers.
- Increased integration
When you move the data to the cloud, all your systems get connected together, and as a result efficiency of all your services is improved.
A renowned and influential IT research company Gartner highlights 5 cloud migration strategies widely known as the “6 R’s”. They are:
- Rehosting
Rehosting, also known as the “lift and shift” approach is the most frequent cloud migration approach applied by companies. According to Forrester, 40% of all cloud migrations are held through rehosting. It’s not only the most popular, but the simplest and fastest of cloud migration approaches. Basically, it’s just dropping the data into the cloud without making extensive changes for the fastest ROI. This cloud migration strategy is perfect for those organizations that aim at the quick implementation of their migration and scaling before evacuating a data center or hosting provider, for instance.
- Refactoring
Refactoring is a cloud migration process that rearchitects applications while transferring them to the cloud. Through modifying existing software or a big part of the code base, refactoring strongly benefits from cloud-based features. Compared to other strategies, refactoring is significantly more complex, as it requires application code changes and thorough testing. Such peculiarities make the approach the most time-consuming and resource-intensive. Though, it also pays off completely as soon as you start running the cloud.
- Replatforming
Replatforming is something in between rehosting and refactoring. It involves some modifications of the application to benefit from the new cloud infrastructure without changing the core infrastructure of it. Replatforming is a rather cost-efficient approach as it doesn’t require a solid development process. It also allows applications to take the advantage of cloud capabilities such as data processing services, auto-scaling, IaC, etc. On the other hand, you need to be aware that there is a possibility that the re-platforming project can be turned into a refactoring one, requiring more costs and time.
- Repurchasing
The central tenet of repurchasing is the decision of an organization to move to another product which frequently means putting an end to existing licensing and moving to a new platform. For instance a CRM system or an industry-specific application that is not developed to run on cloud. Most commonly, it’s a move to a SaaS platform.
- Retiring
Retiring stands for recognizing assets and services that can be turned off in order to enhance the business case, concentrate on the things that are used by people, and reduce the amount of data that you have to secure.
- Retaining
If you are not ready or don’t need to migrate some parts of your IT portfolio into the cloud, you can retain them in the current environment and opt for a part migration strategy.
