Optimise your journey with these effective steps to cloud migration

Published by Logicalis Australia
Topic: Trends in Cloud Migration 
Expert: Dileep Pradeep 

Optimise your journey with these effective steps to cloud migration   

Cloud computing is fast becoming critical for organisations that need to work from anywhere, optimise costs, scale the business up or down, or empower company-wide innovation. While many organisations have already initiated their cloud journey, most are still at the early stages of shifting core business applications to the cloud.

At a recent Gartner conference in London1, analysts predict that by 2028, 70% of all workloads will run in a cloud environment, up from 25% in 2023. They also predict that over half of these organisations will not be getting value from their multi-cloud implementations by 2028.  

While the shift to the cloud is happening rapidly, it’s also essential to consider the overall value that cloud computing can bring. To drive more value, many organisations choose to adopt a cloud-first strategy when planning and developing technology, services and infrastructure.  

The most common way for cloud conversations to start within an organisation is around the need to optimise technology costs. Cloud considerations often coincide with new infrastructure deals, facility updates, technology approaching end-of-life, or hardware needing a refresh.  

There’s no one solution or path to take when it comes to cloud migration, and there are many factors to consider for each organisation.  

Let’s look at the three phases typical to any cloud migration journey.  

Phase 1 - Discovery 

With so many factors at play, starting any cloud migration journey with a solid understanding of what the business wants to achieve, and the nature of apps, data and systems used within the organisation is crucial. This phase is critical to do well, as the impact of poor or uninformed decisions during migration can have far-reaching effects for years to come.

While some IT teams have good knowledge of their environment, it is common to see others that don’t have the same comprehensive understanding. Some are simply newer to the journey or may have already started cloud migration without it. Trusted third parties like Logicalis use various tools to help make every discovery phase thorough and insightful. The depth of technical expertise and industry experience can also add significant value to the discovery process.  

The topic of cloud security will often come up during the discovery phase. Many security benefits can come from migrating to the cloud, but it requires an acute awareness of system requirements and where gaps or overlaps might exist.  

The good news is that most cloud providers invest heavily in developing security measures and infrastructure well beyond what a company could achieve by itself. To benefit from more robust cloud security measures, it’s vital for organisations to focus on security aspects such as identity and access management, regular audits and penetration testing and strong data encryption. Keep in mind that the lifecycle of data compared to infrastructure is much longer, so a little forward-thinking around encryption can be a plus.  

Phase 2 – Migration  

Once you’ve mapped out your systems, apps, data and processes, it’s time to develop a migration plan and timeline. This is where understanding the goals of the business, the environment, the lifecycle of applications and infrastructure and identifying their dependencies is helpful.  

Choosing the best option for your organisation comes after careful evaluation and can include:

• Rehosting: If your applications have a decent lifespan ahead, then a simple approach is to ‘lift and shift’ your on-premises applications to the cloud. This is a more straightforward option without any added changes or cloud features.  
• Refactoring: Refactoring is a suitable approach if you slightly need to use the native PaaS services into your existing applications and features using so they can easily connect with other systems in the cloud. This approach slightly reduces the operations cost.  
• Replatforming: This option transfers an application across to the cloud and includes some optimisation to make the most out of the benefits of the cloud.
• Rearchitecting: If you need to change how your legacy or monolithic applications work in the current environment and transform this to adopt more modular services, utilise the cloud native services and add new features or other elements, then rearchitecting is a good option.
• Replace: This option focuses on utilising the commercial off the shelf products (COTS) which is readily available in the market and is offered as a software as a service (SaaS). This option suits if you want to eliminate the transformation effort for an application and if the available solution can provide all the necessary functionality for the hosted application.  

Phase 3 – Optimisation and Monitoring  

Migrating to the cloud is not a “set and forget” situation. To get the most benefit, cost savings and capabilities from the cloud, you need to plan for ongoing monitoring to help optimise costs and performance. A Managed Services provider like Logicalis can help, bringing you access to the latest tools and industry knowledge to help maximise the benefits. This also frees up your team so they can focus on more important aspects of the business.

By following this approach, your tech team can confidently navigate their cloud migration journey. Remember, a successful migration is a collaborative effort that requires careful planning, a nuanced approach and a commitment to continuous improvement.