The adoption of cloud infrastructures in enterprises is a growing trend. Migrating the entire organizational structure to a cloud-based platform has never been easier. A well-designed and robust cloud platform can easily transform the way you do business. The cloud allows data to be stored and managed without the need to manage or maintain physical infrastructure, reducing costs and speeding up implementation.
Below we will explain the most common stages that can be found in the development of cloud migration.
Analysis of technical and business needs
This first phase involves determining the objectives of the migration and deciding on the most appropriate method or strategy to migrate, depending on different factors such as purpose, timelines, and constraints.
Moving data to the cloud, or even changing cloud service providers, carries both risks and benefits, so it is essential that the business is fully committed to the success of the migration process and prepared for the changes that will occur.
Planning and evaluation of resources
In this stage, a complete analysis of your IT environment will be performed, i.e. your current infrastructure and the applications you use will be evaluated to determine the most appropriate migration strategy to avoid anything going wrong during or after the migration.
In addition, it should be taken into account that there is the option to choose between three different types of cloud platforms: private, public, and hybrid. There is also the option to assess the computing resources needed through three cloud computing models: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).
In this step, it will be important to decide, taking into account the pros and cons, whether to carry out the migration while keeping the infrastructure as close as possible to the original one (lift and shift) or to take advantage of the process to refactor the applications, so as to take more and better advantage of the benefits that the cloud provider can offer. This decision will have a significant impact on timelines and complexity, among other factors.
Design and construction
This phase is usually the most time-consuming. Before migrating an application to the cloud, we must first design a migration plan that defines the sequence of migration activities and the resources that will be used to subsequently carry out the migration and validation process of these applications.
It should be highlighted that it may be necessary to work on the management of application resources in order to reduce their consumption and, in this way, optimize costs.
Testing
This is the most important phase of migration. Despite preparing an elaborate cloud migration plan, problems and risks cannot be completely eliminated, so it is extremely important to test and ensure that applications are running smoothly in the cloud environment.
Pilot testing helps to check whether services and applications are working, and thus whether they can be migrated to the cloud without problems. At the same time, the test results also help to identify migration issues and risks, thoroughly verifying the entire process to be carried out.
Migration
If the pilot tests are successful, data and application migration can take place. The final phase of migration to the cloud involves the use of the necessary tools to speed up and automate the process, e.g. the use of infrastructure as code.
Monitoring
Once the migration has been successfully completed, it is important to implement infrastructure monitoring to help identify and fix any problems that may arise in the new environment, and to implement an alerting system to report major problems at all times.
It is worth remembering that these cloud migration phases may be different depending on the type of cloud migration. Also, the phases differ from one cloud platform to another. It is therefore important to work with a partner who is an expert in cloud infrastructure and development to make the most of the advantages offered by the cloud. Geko’s team has wide experience in different areas, working with DevOps methodology and guaranteeing our clients 100% adaptation to their infrastructures and technologies when migrating to the cloud.
If you are interested in learning more about the types of cloud migration or other information prior to migrating to the cloud, we recommend you read some of our posts: