Perfecting Cloud Migration: Paving the Way – Part 1

At present, enterprises still uphold on-premises application hosting within self-managed Data Centers. A study by Gartner states that 40% of enterprises will still be running their applications on-premises in 2023. While valid reasons might underscore this choice, it is essential to acknowledge the inherent limitations of such self-managed Data Centers, manifesting in reduced infrastructure agility and escalated maintenance commitments. These constraints culminate in amplified costs and prolonged time-to-market for critical business applications.

This discourse emerges as an invaluable resource for enterprises poised to embark on a transformative journey through Cloud Migration for select applications or specific environments. Delving into evaluating Cloud options, optimal methodologies, migration prerequisites, and the critical considerations for formulating an impeccable Cloud migration strategy, this blog stands as a guiding beacon. The importance of systematic analysis and deliberate, gradual inception, marked by POC initiatives, cannot be overstated before any definitive decisions are undertaken.

Rather than centering on the creation of a Cloud Native application or the conversion of a legacy application into a Cloud Native format, let us emphasize more on migrating on-premises application(s) to harness the advantages offered by Cloud-based infrastructure solutions.

How to evaluate Cloud partners

There are a lot of Cloud infrastructure providers, and the top ones by market share are Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure, and Google's GCP. Determining the optimal fit for your application requirements stands as a pivotal facet demanding meticulous evaluation within the initial analysis of your Cloud migration strategy. Here are the key areas to evaluate:

1. Corporate preferences

The first thing to do is to check within the enterprise if there is/are any preferred public Cloud partners. If so, evaluating with them is the best place to start. Pick the ones that best fit your application's needs if there are multiple partners.

2. Product compatibility and support

The vendor products used by your application play a vital role while zeroing in on the Cloud provider. There could be cases where the vendor products used could support specific Cloud providers or their services versus others. Engaging the product vendors and consulting with them on the compatibility and support of Cloud providers helps narrow down options.

3. Cost and pricing

The Cloud calls for heightened flexibility and encompasses diverse avenues for cost reduction vis-à-vis on-premises self-managed Data Centers—a critical aspect for businesses. An adept comprehension of the cost dynamics and pricing structures across different Cloud providers is paramount during the preliminary analysis phases. These providers offer many avenues for cost reduction, including but not limited to auto-scaling, a choice between on-demand and reserved instances, and tailored instance types.

Socializing with partner teams

While focusing on a successful Cloud migration strategy tailored for the B2B landscape, necessary coherence among partner teams takes precedence, illuminating the prevailing on-prem Data Center challenges and elucidating the transformative potential of Cloud migration becomes paramount. Inevitably, queries, obstacles, and reservations may arise within various teams, underscoring the significance of candid discourse. A pivotal avenue for fostering productive conversations lies in persuading teams to engage in meticulous evaluation within a Proof of Concept (POC) framework, ensuring continuous momentum in the journey toward Cloud migration excellence.

1. Identifying

Identify the critical teams and team members supporting your application(s). These teams could be your data providers, data consumers, platform team, middleware team, networking team, security team, infrastructure team, etc.

2. Onboarding

It is essential to onboard the significant teams identified for articulating the current Cloud migration challenges. Anticipate encountering resistance and transition smoothly by involving all parties as stakeholders in the migration process.

3. Collaborating

Making the key teams stakeholders of such change would help collaborate and share the effort and success. Make it a collaborative and collective effort/agenda of your enterprise instead of just your application's agenda.

Corporate Cloud processes

Embarking on Cloud migration entails managing multifaceted enterprise processes, necessitating rigorous scrutiny and approvals from security, compliance, and legal divisions. The strategic imperative now demands the initiation of a comprehensive exploration into obtaining endorsements from these critical teams. Leveraging the established frameworks governing software and hardware onboarding within most enterprises offers a reasonable starting point for this pivotal endeavor.

Security

Engage the security team and explain the current state of your applications and what you expect to do as part of Cloud migration. Collaborate with the security team to extend all corporate security measures to Cloud.

Encryption

If there are requirements to have Data at rest or in-motion encrypted, then you need to evaluate how it will be achieved on the Cloud. You could engage your Cloud and vendor partners to assess this and present it to the security team for review and approval.

Legal

The legal proceedings should have already been handled if there is an existing Cloud partner. The partner agreements must be established if your application is the first to go through Cloud Migration. Any vendor product or custom software that could be migrated to the Cloud as part of this exercise must be evaluated from a compliance standpoint. Evaluate if the same licenses would work or if separate Cloud licenses need to be procured.

Vendor products

The Cloud migration of your application(s) might involve incorporating vendor products or solutions, encompassing databases, web servers, application servers, messaging systems, load balancers, schedulers, and more. Thorough evaluation demands proactive engagement with each vendor product and its associated entity to ascertain their compatibility and effectiveness.

Compatibility and support

Each vendor product must be evaluated for compatibility and support for the chosen Cloud partner and their services.

It is also essential to evaluate the Operating Systems the Cloud partner offers and the compatibility of the vendor products with the provided OS. If the offered OS is incompatible, you need to evaluate bringing your own OS image to the Cloud and sort out the licenses on the Cloud.

Performance and benchmarks

The vendor products must also be evaluated for the performance of the chosen Cloud provider and its services. If the vendor product is supported on the selected Cloud, there should be performance benchmarks with the vendor, which should be requested and evaluated.

If it's a custom application, the performance should be evaluated as part of POC, and the results should be compared with on-prem.

Cloud services and infrastructure

Apart from infrastructure, there are other Cloud services that the Cloud providers offer. They could be a database-as-service, platform-as-service, etc. For instance, if you are currently using Cloudera Data Platform and your chosen Cloud is AWS, it's better to evaluate AWS EMR, which offers a similar Hadoop platform.

Vendor-managed vs Self-managed

Sometimes, the Cloud migration process opens doors for vendor-managed services. For instance, if you use self-managed Elastic Search in your current on-prem setup as part of Cloud migration, you will have an option of Vendor-managed Elastic Cluster. So, evaluate if you want to self-manage your clusters or if the vendor must manage them for you.

Note that once your application is migrated to the Cloud using the self-managed approach, it can be changed into a vendor-managed one.

The subsequent procedures

With the foundation solidified through collaboration across designated teams, the next phase entails delineating a POC for meticulous execution and comprehensive assessment of diverse facets within the Cloud infrastructure. POC. Part II of this blog contains a comprehensive overview of the complete migration details.

Mastech InfoTrellis specializes in multifaceted solutions, spanning multi and hybrid-Cloud automation, bespoke Cloud application deployment, legacy workload containerization, and beyond. Catering to enterprises contemplating the pivotal shift to the Cloud, Mastech InfoTrellis presents an array of Cloud adoption services meticulously crafted to surmount a spectrum of migration challenges and requisites with unparalleled expertise.