1. WHAT'S THE CLOUD?
2. FACTORS TO CONSIDER MOVING TO THE CLOUD
Stability
Security
Cost
Scale-ability
3. MIGRATION PROCESS
Planning
Testing Migration
Decommission
4. WHAT NOW?
Maintenance
Security
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1. WHAT'S THE CLOUD?
Simply, the act is taking your data or your IT services and moving it away from your local infrastructure to somebody else's infrastructure hosted elsewhere. This has been going on since the first website.
2. FACTORS TO CONSIDER MOVING TO THE CLOUD
It depends on the size of the company, the industry you're in, your mentality, ownership, and financial health. Here are my four main factors:
Stability
If you want to be extremely stable, you're going to have to pony up and spend the money for tons of internet connection, lots of cooling, and lots of server space that are likely scattered across multiple cities. So, what you can afford greatly dictates the terms of stability.
Security
Some people like having their data in their own data center, they know exactly who has access to it. And to them, that security is the most effective way you could possibly be If you flip side of that Microsoft Research. In fact, for example, they have your data and multiple data center, lots of people have access to those servers, I'm sure they have a million different options for allowing people to have access to those data centers.
Cost
Establishing and running a data center is expensive. You need to purchase the right equipment and hire technicians to install and manage the center. When you shift to cloud computing, you will only pay for the services procured. More interested in how the cloud can reduce cost in your business? Check out the importance of the cloud to enterprise then.
Providers charge cloud computing services based the features, storage, number of users, time, and memory space among other factors. Hence, you can choose a package that suits your budget and save costs. Cloud service infrastructure affords you flexibility and the best equipment in the industry: the newest high-end processors, the most optimized RAM memory, networking, SSD storage, arrays of GPUs, and even cloud programmable hardware.
Scale-Ability
Scale is the last thing to consider. It is nothing more than how fast you want to grow. If you're going to grow your business tenfold In five years, it's a lot easier to scale your business with the Microsoft 365 example. The traditional way of planning for unexpected growth is to purchase and keep additional servers, storage, and licenses. It may take years before you actually use the reserve resources. Scaling cloud computing services is easy. You can get additional storage space or features whenever you need them. Your provider will simply upgrade your package within minutes as long as you meet the additional cost. One of the biggest advantages of having your data warehouse in the cloud is scalability. Some cloud data warehouses enable you to add new nodes on the fly. Others make it simple to resize a cluster. For example, BigQuery supports scaling up to a petabyte. This makes the ebbs and flows in your workload appear seamless to users.
3. MIGRATION PROCESS
Planning
The first thing you might do is you want to plan it out. Implement a data pipeline, extract, transform, and then load (ETL) your data into your new cloud data warehouse.
The following factors need to be considered when deciding what needs to be migrated to the cloud.
Database complexity - Database migration is a complex and multiphase process, so it should be done with careful planning. In fact, planning takes up more time than the actual process.
Networking capacity - The networking capacity of the cloud migration can be analyzed through an asset discovery tool that could be either open source or commercial. The tool would help you identify the server configurations within a particular network, complete with connectivity details and all. It gives you the bird’s eye view of the system in totality.
Application design complexity - The application architecture must be loosely coupled in order for it to be suitable for cloud migration. If not, the application’s design and architecture might require some sort of modification before it is migrated to the cloud, especially if does not follow the distributed cloud architecture. This mostly happens with traditional applications that are tightly coupled. A migration can be successful only when the app follows distributed architecture and can be scaled as and when required.
Integration complexity - Analyze the integration points like payment gateways, SMTP servers, web services, external storage, and third party vendors before planning to migrate. Or else, it would begin to affect the dependencies leading to authentication or connectivity challenges.
Host OS compatibility - Have an idea of the host operating system, and check whether you can deploy the application on the same OS. If there are compatibility issues, then you will have to look for a substitute solution or change the cloud provider.
Testing
You can hire a manager to plan and oversee the entire migration process to help cover all the critical aspects. Planning and preparation are the most important concepts in migration.
You can start by deciding what needs to be moved first. And you also need to decide whether to go for a single provider or choose different vendors for different requirements (multi-cloud option). You can start by moving the easier applications and the critical ones later. This way, you can test the waters before plunging.
The changes required in application architecture also need to be considered at this point. You can update parts of your system so they migrate well. There are servers, networks and data services that may work one way in your computing environment and differently in the cloud.
Additionally, you will need to have a plan in place to deal with:
Code changes - Significant code changes may have to be performed to ensure the app works optimally after migration.
Performance issues – Lack of proper resources can affect the performance of the application. And it can also happen when the application architecture is not properly distributed over the cloud resources.
Downtime - Downtime is a crucial and commonly faced challenge during migration. You can counter this problem by having a backup environment and allocate resources to run the app until the migration is truly completed.
Security compliance - It is important to increase security and adhere to compliance standards while migrating sensitive data. All the standards, guidelines, regulatory and compliance requirements must be addressed.
Ultimately, it is the team’s expertise and skill that translates the entire migration process into a successful act, so make sure they are sufficiently briefed well in advance.
Migrating
Planning the actual migration process can make the entire exercise smooth and hassle-free. There are different techniques to copy the files and databases, and this depends on their size and complexity. If you have very large data sets, then it would be a good idea to compress them. If the data is still big enough, you can ship them over to the cloud service provider and control your bandwidth costs. You can also back up the data and applications before migrating.
Once you set up the cloud environment, ensure provisioning, components and connections are in order.
Security is also very important during migration. You are sending a lot of information and code, so even the temporary storage must be highly secured, so there should be no leak of any sort. Using cloud migration tools would help greatly in moving all the data and applications securely.
Decommission
Once the migration has been successfully completed, you need to make sure that everything is good. There is an automated testing strategy to ensure the following:
- Were you able to transfer all the data?
- Are the internal components able to communicate optimally
- How is the monitoring of the app in the cloud going on?
- Is your app accessible to all?
Check all the key metrics to ensure migration has been completely successful.
4. WHAT NOW?
Maintenance
Security
With security threats only increasing in scale and severity, we know many enterprises that are migrating to the cloud to mitigate risk. Public cloud providers offer vast resources for protecting against threats—more than nearly any single company could invest in. Sometimes storing data on the cloud is safer than storing it on physical servers and data centers. A breach of security at your premises can lead compromised data security if laptops or computers are stolen. If you have data on the cloud, you can delete any confidential information remotely or move it to a different account. Breaching the security measures on clouding platforms is difficult. Hence, you are assured of data security. Here’s what everyone should know about cyber security in the cloud. By making use of the cloud, you can potentially reduce the number of data centers needed in your organization. Instead, you may be able to get by with one data center for particularly sensitive information, or even zero if that is not needed in your case. This, of course, can help save on the costs of operating multiple data centers.
