Cloud migration has accelerated during Covid-19 and it’s easy to see why with benefits like:  

But migrations can be complex so it’s best to ask the right kind of questions up front. Here are the top three things we help our customers identify before beginning a cloud migration project:

1. Cloud readiness of data, workloads and applications: 

Testing workloads and applications that are currently running on on-premise infrastructure and understanding their readiness for the cloud is fundamental to the success of any migration project.    

Legacy applications tend to be hosted locally, in-house or on traditional private cloud models and probably won’t have been designed with the cloud in mind. Traditional monolithic enterprise applications may not be an ideal fit for the public cloud and workloads with significant data storage requirements may require refactoring to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities to ensure availability and cost-effectiveness. 

The complexity of this is why the majority of cloud migrations actually choose a managed hybrid cloud model rather than a full public cloud solution.   

2. Storage and cost models:

One of the main benefits of cloud is that it automatically scales to support larger workloads and more users – but as your cloud storage scales, so can its costs. Understanding cloud storage and costs models is important when developing an effective cloud model.  

When migrating to an AWS cloud model you need to optimise your AWS resources and leverage the right mix of AWS commercial levers. This helps minimise monthly cloud spend so you can forecast costs and, if required, chargeback/show back cloud costs to the business, product teams or projects.  

3. Network performance:

Careful consideration of upstream and downstream dependencies, including shared services such as backup and common storage need to be carefully considered when considering cloud migration. Planning co-migration of dependent applications and components will ensure network bottlenecks are not introduced across a wide area network (WAN). 

These are just some of the things you need to consider carefully as part of a cloud migration. As an AWS consulting partner, Brightsolid has helped businesses of all sizes enjoy the benefits of cloud by successfully migrating their data, applications and workloads.  

For Aceville Publications, for example, a migration of 24 digital publications to a secure AWS cloud environment saw them experience increased flexibility, improved end-to-end deployment automation and enhanced security controls.

If you’re thinking about migrating to the cloud, get in touch with the Brightsolid team and we’d be delighted to talk through your options.