Since the beginning of COVID-19, digitization has been the topic of conversation in almost every boardroom, and cloud migration has skyrocketed in tandem. A study of 87% of IT decision-makers revealed that the pandemic would lead to accelerated cloud migrations as a result of remote work reorganization.
There has been no slowdown in that trend. According to Gartner, cloud spending will increase by 23% in 2021 to reach $332B. Multi-cloud infrastructures are driving this historic shift. Many companies now separate and distribute vital data flows across several clouds provided by multiple service providers. A large majority of enterprises said they already have multi-cloud strategies, while a large majority said they had hybrid cloud strategies.
Adoption is increasing for a variety of reasons. Due to containers’ agility and portability, developers can test their applications across multiple systems in the multi-cloud environment to accelerate innovation. Multi-cloud adoption also enables businesses to plan cloud migrations more carefully and less in a ‘big bang’ style.
This also means that IT departments are more stressed when weighing the costs, benefits, and risks of shifting to a multi-cloud strategy. It is therefore important for them to decide whether to move their data to a public cloud, keep it on-premises, or combine both.
During our unrelenting cybersecurity emergency, which we call the pandemic, they need to guarantee the application’s ironclad security as a mission-critical consideration. Additionally, they may be worried that such a large-scale cloud migration could lead to reduced revenue and increased downtime.
To help enterprises seamlessly migrate to multi-cloud environments, here are five tips.
You can make smart decisions regarding cloud migration by determining your organization’s correct mix of public, private, and hybrid clouds. Migration plans are the foundation of all successful migrations.
How to approach the planning process?
The move from on-premises to the cloud is a significant undertaking, regardless of your ecosystem’s simplicity or the amount of infrastructure being moved. In the planning process for any major system migration, concrete objectives should form the cornerstone, and all components should contribute to achieving these objectives.
Although a cloud migration involves a variety of components, it can be challenging to juggle, especially if you have disparate workloads, applications, and hosting environments. Therefore, we’ve simplified the cloud migration process into four steps that you can use as a starting point for a successful migration.
Assess the ripeness of your application
It is important to audit all existing applications for migration readiness before migrating them. An organization should examine the application’s dependencies and the ecosystem in which it lives. As part of its network ecosystem, the company would have to implement configurations, policies, load balancers, and security and compliance controls.
Organize and prepare
IT teams often waste valuable time and productivity during this phase, making it a particularly challenging phase. To ensure a smooth migration to the cloud, the entire organization must outline its migration journey, identify which departments will be affected, and delegate responsibilities. These discussions should involve IT operations, development, quality assurance, key stakeholders, and leadership to ensure predictable migrations.
Think carefully about the options you have for the cloud
For each organization, choosing the right cloud is entirely based on its individual needs, challenges, and opportunities. Every enterprise has a variety of providers at its disposal, but the best option will be determined by financial constraints, goals for adopting the cloud, and even resources already available.
When a business chooses to use multiple clouds, these decisions become even more complicated-especially since, according to the Flexera report, the average cloud company uses 2.6 public clouds and 2.7 private clouds. 88% of businesses use private networks to enable their multi-cloud strategy.
Furthermore, decision-makers must also take into account the security risks posed by each provider. Since the onset of COVID-19, there has been a big increase in cyber-attacks on enterprises’ cloud infrastructures. Migration partners can provide businesses with recommendations on which cloud providers are most appropriate for them; analyzing their costs and which options will ease the migration process.
Create Your Migration Checklist
A company’s goal is to move its workloads swiftly and seamlessly from on-premises to the cloud, and migrating enterprise workloads is the most critical step of its cloud journey. Businesses can achieve this goal by creating a checklist, which assists them in prioritizing the most crucial aspects of their journey and understanding the repercussions of an inefficient transition.
Companies must aim for a little downtime and minimal service disruption during the migration process. Losing access to the network and experiencing system downtime can cause immediate pain to a company in the form of lost productivity and opportunities. An average downtime cost of $5,600 per minute is reported by Gartner, making a well-planned and efficient migration strategy extremely important to a company’s bottom line.
Considering every business migration is unique and unforeseen challenges are likely to arise that are native to the environment, it’s beneficial for organizations to work with an expert migration team to develop their checklist and ensure their migrations are streamlined and seamless.
Validating Your Cloud Journey
Businesses must validate that all their existing resources and infrastructure have been migrated and are fully operational in their target cloud environment as the final step in the migration journey. A successful cloud migration trip ends with this step. It is primarily a manual process that ensures that nothing is overlooked, as well as following a complete testing lifecycle.
Pointers for the post-migration period
Migrating to the cloud can be complex, especially if your company uses a traditionally manual, years-old process. Enterprises today enjoy substantial time and cost savings by deploying migration strategies that move workloads across multiple clouds within seconds rather than days in the age of automation.
In today’s landscape of climate change and growing cybersecurity threats, an organization’s migration journey may be complete, but even then managing several clouds simultaneously creates its own set of challenges and risks. Organizations must therefore prioritize resiliency and minimize downtime by enhancing security measures and developing effective disaster recovery plans.
The cloud’s future of work is clear since hybrid work is forcing C-suites to scale their digital transformation plans even further. Due to the unpredictability of cloud-related spending, enterprises need to invest substantial resources in migration and management, as well as insecurity.