Fayez Eltinawi, Pre-Sales Manager at Bespin Global talked to Channel Post MEA about the dynamics and the importance of seamless cloud migration.
What is cloud migration and how does on-premises-to-cloud migration work?
Cloud migration is the process of moving IT workloads to the cloud which offers many benefits to the businesses that are adopting digital transformation through better business agility, geographical distribution, availability, better performance and scalability. According to Gartner, “Enterprise adoption of public cloud is growing to the point that public cloud is an expected approach to IT”
Businesses with legacy, on-premise infrastructure are increasingly looking for efficient, organized ways to migrate to the cloud. Through cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, the market has become mature enough for organizations to transform their legacy infrastructure and move their applications to a cloud-based environment.
The Need for Cloud Migration and cloud adaptation become more demanding because of the new technical aspects of digital business transformation such as the Internet Of Things, Mobile Technologies, Big Data and Data Analysis.
What are the benefits of cloud migration?
Migrating to the cloud allows enterprises to focus more on their core business and use the cloud infrastructure and its advanced services to serve the business applications with minimal overhead from management, cost and planning perspectives.
Moreover, there are many benefits of Cloud migration on the business, technology and technical levels. There are various business benefits to cloud migration. The key amongst it is predictable cost. Cloud services are typically paid monthly or based on use with little or no upfront costs. This means that instead of making a substantial initial capital investment, technology or services are purchased by existing operating costs. Cloud services also reduce total cost, gives access to the best technology and, organizations pay for actual rather than maximum use.
From technology and technical perspectives, migrating to the cloud means you should be able to deploy your apps and services more quickly. It also ensures enhanced security features. Most cloud providers take care of some of the tougher security issues, like ensuring automatic security updates are applied to their systems to keep them from being vulnerable to the latest known security threats. Cloud-based solutions are ideal for businesses with growing or fluctuating bandwidth demands. If your business demands increase, you can easily increase your cloud capacity without having to invest in physical infrastructure. This level of agility can give businesses using cloud computing a real advantage over competitors.
What are some of the migration strategies adopted by enterprises?
Depending on the workload type, applications and business units, enterprises typically pick one of the following migration strategies:
- Lift and Shift (a.k.a. The IaaS approach)- This approach is the most common, where a business rehosts all of its applications and moves them from an on-premise environment to a cloud infrastructure.
- Refactoring and Replatforming (a.k.a. The PaaS approach)- The second migration strategy is to rewrite parts of your workload to be compatible with the new cloud infrastructure. Some aspects of your applications can remain as is, but other parts may need to be rebuilt to operate properly on a cloud service provider such as AWS, GCP and MS. Azure
- Replace (a.k.a. the SaaS approach) – If the workload you are migrating is a commodity application (e.g., email, CRM), or has commodity components (e.g., a relational database), you can incorporate a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach into the mix. This will help accelerate migration plans, as well as reduce management overhead.
What are the factors to be considered during migration?
The cloud enables organizations to effectively balance agile innovation with continuity, the scale at volume, reduce IT costs and mitigate security risks.
But successful migration to the cloud requires an organization to carefully consider various factors.
- Deciding what to moveand when- This is probably the most critical part of any enterprise cloud migration strategy. Prioritizing the applications and their dependencies along with deciding the proper migration strategy for each application is a complex process that needs the proper tools, methodology and expertise.
- Business Downtime – Downtime is frequently cited as the biggest challenge of migrating workloads to the cloud. The biggest hurdle between a successful and unsuccessful cloud migration over time is network connectivity. Even the minutest downtime can be catastrophic to the business, both in terms of revenue and reputation. 98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000 (Source: Rand Group).
- Data Security and compliance risks- One of the prime barriers to cloud migration is data security concerns and compliance. This is because companies and organizations alike are still hesitant to hand over their private data to third-party cloud services, despite the cloud environment being completely secure. The SANS 2019: The State of Cloud Security report shows that 56 per cent of respondents indicated that they’re extremely concerned about cloud security when moving to the cloud
- Consider the impact on culture, people and processes- Cloud is more than a technology initiative. Its impact on culture and people is quite significant. It’s important to ensure that ‘change’ is driven throughout the organization.
How does Bespin Global aid in Cloud Migration?
Bespin Global can help enterprises to achieve successful, systematic and stable migration. We combine our deep industry experience and technology insights to deliver a seamless modernization and migration experience through choosing the cloud strategy, operating model, and ecosystem partners.
Our Cloud Migration services provide execution of the optimal migration strategy, migration testing and change management to ensure awareness of changes in process and access to the new cloud-based system.
Whether it’s rehosting, refactoring, revising, rebuilding, or retiring and replacing your applications, Bespin Global’s team of experts will guide the enterprise through the entire migration process using a structured approach to ensure the optimal strategy for each workload.
Leveraging automated migration tools for a smooth transition, our team of experts work closely with the enterprise customers to ensure their transformation plan stays on track. Our infrastructure support team can also help maintain the current infrastructure during the transition, minimizing disruption as they cut over to new systems.
