Best strategies for On-premises to Cloud migration – Step-by-step guide

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On-Premise to Cloud Migration Process

If you want a comprehensive On-premise to Cloud migration guide, you can refer it here.

Although enterprises have a varied set of requirements, given below are the standard process that will give you insights on the migration roadmap.

1. Determine your needs for the On-premise to Cloud migration

Based on your business requirements and needs, you’d want to plan the migration accordingly. The size of your data, the budget you hold, and the needs of your organization should be nailed down at the early stage of migration. However, you can pick from any of the ones given below.

• Public Cloud: Common cloud with servers and storage provided by a third-party vendor
• Private Cloud: Infrastructure, server, storage and everything owned privately
• Hybrid Cloud: A combination of both on-prem and cloud infrastructure

2. Select the best migration strategy suitable for your business

Of all the strategies, the famously known 6Rs are the best ones for On-premise to cloud migration.

Retire: When you have an application that’s redundant and adds no value to your business, it’s better to retire or decommission or archive it. The server in which all the tech stacks of this particular application remain will be shut down.

Retain: When you have applications that you cannot migrate due to issues pertaining to security & compliance, dependencies, no value for migration or you don’t want to move to other environments, in that scenario, you need to retain the apps in the same source environment.

Rehost: This is the ‘Lift & Shift’ strategy in which you migrate the apps from the source environment to the cloud without making any changes. You can migrate and later if you need any optimization changes, you can perform them after the migration.

Relocate: Your overall architecture remains the same and you just move to the cloud and continue your operations. You upgrade from the on-prem to the cloud version of the platform.

Repurchase: This is called as ‘Drop and Shop’, In this, you replace your existing solution with a different version cloud solution that is in your budget for all the license expenses.

Refactor: If your legacy architecture is not helping you meet your business needs, you need to configure and modify the architecture in such a way that it increases the productivity and efficiency in the cloud.

Want to know more about cloud platforms and possibilities? Check out our comprehensive guide!

Now that you know the benefits of migrating to the cloud, the process, and the strategies for the migration, let’s understand the challenges and the ugly picture too as it will help you brace up and be ready for whatever may come your way.

Challenges of on-premise to cloud migration

• Not enough planning

When you are migrating from on-prem to the cloud, it is crucial that you plan meticulously as it is the main key. Nailing down a detailed plan is significantly as important as the migration itself. However, you need to have experts or professionals who can deal with this without missing corners.

• Faulty pre-migration analysis

Analyzing your business needs is essential as that’s what helps you move further in the migration process. When you have your initial sketch incorrect, then it’s impossible to get the migration right.

• Lack of expertise

Even when planning is done and analysis is right, if you do not know what to do when, everything will go haywire. Having professionals and experts with in-depth knowledge and hands-on expertise is inevitable for a successful migration.

• Migrating huge amount of data

When you have a huge amount of data, you should probably have a solution that will enable faster migration. You can either prioritize and migrate in batches or you can also migrate with a big bang. But if you do not know a way, your migration will fail utterly.

Well, these are the major challenges when you are dealing with migration. The process of migration is huge and it’d fail if not done right. To prevent this from happening, you should certainly have migration experts or professionals who can help you migrate to the cloud without any hassles.

We at AVASOFT develop your projects, identify your needs and help you navigate in the right direction with migration and integrations.