Cloud Migration: Three things to consider for a successful transition

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

Cloud Migration Benefits - AWS — From AWS. *IDC #US43535718 – Fostering Business and Organizational Transformation to Generate Business Value with Amazon Web Services; February 2018. **Nucleus Research – Guidebook Understanding the Value of Migrating from On-premises to AWS for Application Security and Performance, June 2020

But migrations can be complex, so it’s best to ask the right questions upfront. 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 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 these probably haven’t been designed with the cloud in mind. Traditional monolithic enterprise applications may not be an ideal fit for the public cloud. Workloads with significant data storage requirements may require refactoring to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities to ensure availability and cost-effectiveness.

This complexity is why most cloud migrations 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 cost models is essential when developing an effective cloud model.

When migrating to an AWS cloud model, you must 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, charge back/show back cloud costs to the business, product teams or projects.

3. Network performance:

Upstream and downstream dependencies, including shared services such as backup and common storage, should be carefully considered when migrating to the cloud. Planning co-migration of dependent applications and components will ensure network bottlenecks are not introduced across a vast area network (WAN).

You must consider these things carefully as part of 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.

If you’re considering migrating to the cloud, contact the Brightsolid team. We’d be delighted to discuss your options.