Businesses worldwide aim to achieve agility in their operations with cloud integration. The process of shifting to cloud infrastructure is also known as cloud migration. Incorporating cloud services can also enable enterprises to accomplish scalability and higher productivity.
Sources reflect that over 60% of corporate data is on the cloud, while around 31% of the businesses using the cloud have invested more than $12 million in it. According to experts, cloud infrastructure assists in generating revenue of nearly $178 billion every year. Nevertheless, many enterprises face difficulties while migrating to cloud servers.
This blog shall shed light on the understanding of cloud migration, its importance in business operations, alongside a thorough plan to migrate to cloud.
What is Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration involves transforming digital assets and data storage facilities into cloud environments. It often refers to the activity of moving from one cloud provider to another. Migration can also take place between single and multiple clouds.
In order to become more flexible and save costs, companies are shifting to cloud platforms in a remarkable manner. This method of shifting to the cloud is often called migration. There are various types of cloud migration that depend on the assets and the moving destination, such as:
- Complete migration: Here, companies move all their digital assets, applications, and storage facilities to cloud servers.
- Hybrid migration: Businesses migrate a section of their digital assets in hybrid migration while storing the rest on the primary on-premises servers.
- Workload-specific migration: Companies move workload to the cloud partially such as a few applications, certain databases, and digital assets.
- Cloud-to-cloud shifting: Enterprises move their digital assets from one cloud server to another.
Importance of Cloud Migration:
Moving to cloud servers is an ongoing technological trend that can be advantageous for businesses in many ways. Around 90% of the big firms around the globe have incorporated cloud facilities for better business operations. This leads to an estimation of 200 zettabytes of data to be stored in the cloud by 2025. Below are a few benefits of cloud migration:
Flexibility and scalability: Cloud environments eliminate the hurdles of physical methods of data access and management. Companies can accordingly scale their IT requirements and technical needs at a large.
Higher security: Cloud providers ensure high-security standards when companies migrate to cloud servers. Moreover, the cloud enables data backups, so, if companies go through cyber-attacks, they can easily recover valuable and confidential data.
Lower costs: Cloud service providers usually follow usage-based or pay-as-you-go payment methods. So, businesses pay for the services they utilize while moving to cloud environments. Furthermore, it is cheaper than building and managing an entire infrastructure.
Better performance: Moving to cloud servers makes data accessibility and management easier. Alongside streamlining business activities, it contributes to the enhancement of overall performance.
How to Strategize Cloud Migration?
Assess and plan:
While migrating to cloud servers, companies primarily need to assess suitable applications and datasets and create a plan for the movement. The following steps are important for migration assessment and planning:
- Shortlist the applications, assets, and data for migration
- Evaluate applications with high reliability
- Assess the security needs
- Determine migration objectives
- List down the probable difficulties of migration
Choose and Test: In the following stages, businesses need to select a cloud service provider whose goals align with their objectives and test the migration so that major difficulties do not arise. Below are a few steps for choosing and testing:
- Analyze the services, pricing, and goals of the provider
- Assess provider compatibility with data and apps for migration
- Consider the data control aspects of the provider
- Test the migration flow and timeline beforehand
- Check the security elements while testing
Migrate and monitor: Businesses have to start the cloud migration process after assessing and testing the necessary components. In every step, monitoring is crucial to identify the positives and negatives. The following activities can assist in this regard:
- Follow the primary plan for migration
- Move the applications and datasets in stages
- Evaluate the challenges
- Monitor each progress and performance
Summing up!
While migrating to cloud servers, companies also need to consider a few components that can create difficulties, such as data control, security, employee training, and others. To tackle these challenges and initiate cloud migration, choosing an appropriate service provider whose offerings align with the company’s requirements is important. Check out our latest blogs to stay up to date with popular tech trends.
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