What are the benefits of cloud migration?
Cloud migration allows companies to respond to growth and change by scaling infrastructure resources up or down as required without losing stability.
Benefits of migrating to the cloud include:
- Increased agility and flexibility
- Ability to innovate faster
- Easing of increasing resource demands
- Better managing of increased customer expectations
- Reduction in costs
- Deliver immediate business results
- Simplify IT
- Shift to everything as-a-service
- Better consumption management
- Cloud scalability
- Improved performance
What is a cloud migration approach and strategy?
Determination of the Cloud Migration approach commences in the Assessment Phase and is typically frozen during the Planning Phase. There are six options for the migration approach in any Cloud Migration exercise, often collectively referred to as the “6R framework.”
- Repurchase (“Drop and Shop”)
This strategy involves decommissioning the application and replacing it with a cloud-based version, typically replacing legacy apps with SaaS. It takes a small window to transition or migrate.
- Rehost (“Lift and Shift”)
This strategy involves moving applications from the on-premises environment to the cloud without modification. It is commonly used to migrate large-scale legacy applications to meet specific business objectives, such as an accelerated time to market. The sweet spot of lift and shift migrations is identifying applications that can take advantage of the cloud without architectural changes. For example, applications with variable or seasonal loads can, in most cases, take advantage of the cloud without modification. The cloud can make it easy to scale tiers of the application on demand; for example, by adding more web servers or adding more database instances to a cluster.
- Replatform (“Lift and Shift”)
The replatform strategy involves moving applications almost as-is while possibly replacing some components to take advantage of the cloud. In many cases, this involves switching from traditionally hosted infrastructure to managed services. Another common optimization is switching from commercial software (e.g., monitoring, patching, config management tools) to open source. This can allow you to scale freely in the cloud without worrying about the licensing cost for each additional instance.
- Refactor/Rearchitect
This strategy calls for a complete overhaul of an application to adapt it to the cloud. It is valuable when you have a strong business need for cloud-native features, such as improved development agility, scalability, or performance. In many cases, refactoring involves breaking up the application into independent services and transitioning to a microservices architecture.
- Retire and Retain
The final two strategies are passive — they don’t involve migrating an application to the cloud.
To learn more on migrating to the cloud, visit Migration to Hybrid Cloud.
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