On Premise to Cloud Migration: Main Points Checklist

The migration approach you choose depends a lot on your specific situation. What works well for one organization might be totally wrong for another. Let’s compare the three common migration methods mentioned above.

Full data migration

Full cloud to on-premise migration can be complex, risky, and disruptive, but if done properly, it gets the job done fast. For some businesses, it’s easier to conduct the migration from on premise to cloud overnight. For example, it fits startups and small businesses that don’t have extensive legacy on-premises systems. They can move directly to the cloud instead of managing both old and new infrastructure.

But attempting this without plenty of planning is just asking for trouble. Downtime can be significant, so you need redundancy plans in place to keep operations running. And migrating without optimizing for the cloud first misses key benefits.

Partial cloud migration

It allows moving easier workloads first to gain experience. More complex or integrated systems can migrate later. This approach works well when you have clear cloud usage priorities. It lets you focus on-premises to cloud migration resources on high-value areas first.

But it does prolong reliance on legacy tech and data centers, with their higher costs. Integrating cloud and on-premises systems also brings technical and process challenges. So, while a selective data migration from on-premise to cloud helps control scope, it can increase long-term platform complexity.

Step-by-step cloud migration

With this approach, you might shift one application module each quarter, for example. This lets you spread out migration costs and risks. It also allows time for optimizing workloads and processes for the cloud. Staff also gain experience with each on-premises to cloud migration cycle. This makes each further stage go faster and smoother.

However, a gradual cloud to on-premise migration also means managing both cloud and on-premises for an extended period. Integrating the two can be cumbersome with frequent changes. And until fully migrated, overall agility may not improve much.

A DevOps architect can outline the costs, risks, and timeline for a full, partial, or progressive migration approach based on your systems and needs. Relying on DevOps specialists ensures your data migration from on-premise to cloud project considers security, governance, automation, and other key success factors from the start.

Cloud Migration Roadmap

Either an individual plan of migration or a generally accepted order should be applied to cloud migration by any company that moves to cloud computing. However, a ready-to-use scheme of cloud migration applicable to any business is unlikely available. A roadmap needs to be finalized according to individual metrics such as the business model, data volume, workflow specificity, geographical distribution of offices, etc. The most basic steps of a roadmap include the following:

1. Auditing your IT infrastructure. To assess the current scale of the company’s IT infrastructure a special audit is worth making. It allows recognizing the hierarchy of infrastructural elements and determining their linkage. Besides, such an audit helps detect problem areas in the IT infrastructure to be addressed with special attention when proceeding with cloud migration.
2. Choosing the type of services. There are three common types of clouds. The choice between them is as important as the selection of a cloud migration model is.
   • Public clouds. A hosting provider offers cloud services to a large number of customers while computing facilities, network resources, and data storage are located at one big data center. Public clouds are great for both the infrastructural flexibility and automation of routines. Public clouds are in demand of website owners, online service providers, and software developers.
   • Private clouds A company builds its own cloud infrastructure with the resources to be accessible to intra-company services only. Private clouds contribute most of all to large organizations with rich IT infrastructures and to the ones that deal with sensitive data and state secrets.
   • Hybrid clouds. This is a symbiotic solution of public clouds and private ones where data exchange is managed by a company. Hybrid clouds are beneficial for businesses that face drastic activity outbreaks such as sale-off and promotional campaigns. Hybrid clouds are appropriate for the implementation of sophisticated technological solutions that require multi-stage testing.

3. Selection of cloud providers. Finding an appropriate cloud provider is one of the most challenging tasks before cloud migration starts. You need to make sure that the selected provider is reliable. It implies the one having a corresponding infrastructure, the one who invests enough in the development, and who offers all necessary instruments your business may require. It is a good practice when cloud providers represent a trial period to assess cloud services with a real test project.
4. Signing a Service Level Agreement is highly recommended. Respectable cloud providers always indicate a period over which the client-side services can stay inaccessible. The period should be minimal. They have to take charge of all software failures and hardware errors that may happen at their data center.   
5. Cloud migration mapping. It is crucial to define not just the sequence of actions, but the periods over which every stage is to be completed. Critical services should be transferred only when they are idle (during nighttime, for example). Ideally, you should achieve seamless cloud migration indetectable for your customers.

Relocation Of Your Infrastructure

When your cloud migration roadmap is finalized you can start relocating your IT infrastructure to a cloud. At the final stage, it is necessary to test your services in a cloud environment to correct errors that can occur during migration. The very relocation process can be conducted with a few different techniques. 

Backuping. The simplest manual way of cloud migration is suitable when it is necessary to transfer data from a hardware server to a cloud. Also, it is worth using when data is to be relocated from a virtual platform that, for some reason, is incompatible with a cloud provider’s facilities. 

You can use a special cloud migration tool such as Veeam Agent for Servers that copies data from your hardware and sends it to a repository – a cloud data storage of backups. A virtual server of a similar capacity should be created in a cloud. After that, all backuped data can be recovered from the repository via Veeam Recovery Media. As a result, your infrastructure appears in the cloud.

• Synchronization. This cloud migration technique is suitable for Unix-like operating systems. The RSync tool is applied to synchronize files and catalogs. A virtual machine is to be created in a cloud while an RSync daemon is set up at the client side. After synchronization is completed, the recipient virtual machine becomes the exact copy of the source hardware. 
• Cloud-migration services. This technique is the most common method of cloud migration today. Its main advantage is in the provided automation of data relocation processes. Besides, special cloud-migration software minimizes both workloads and risks working with precise time management. The services spare you from the need to monitor how each application migrates to a cloud since the software tools do it on your behalf. 
• There are dozens of cloud migration software services on the market. The most famous ones are created by the leading digital giants: AWS Migration Services (from Amazon), Azure Migration Tools (from Microsoft), Google Migration Services, etc. It is hardly worth mentioning all of them in the present post since numerous reviews of the top tools to migrate on-premise to the cloud can be easily found on the internet. They all have their specific pros and cons. Some of them are free, the others are not. Even though minimal staff training is required to proceed with the tools the majority of cloud-migration services seem to be very user-friendly.

Conclusion  

The above-given checklist of main points to be addressed before on premise to cloud migration represents a comprehensive idea of how to arrange a proper relocation of your IT infrastructure to a cloud. Almost all critical factors beginning from the reasons of why to migrate and up to tools and techniques of cloud migration are explained. It seems the tech-savvy business owners can use our info to commence cloud migration with no further hesitation. 

However, the great diversity of business activities can introduce some extra concerns about the topic. Unlikely anyone accepts experiments when it comes to one’s own IT infrastructure – the stakes are high. Everyone is looking for guaranteed outcomes of migration whatever sort of business they are about. And obviously, a vast hands-on experience helps in a way that little else does.

Contact our experts to harmonize your cloud migration agenda with the peculiar features of your company. We can provide you with a business-specific custom solution that prevents you from seeking different cloud services in the future.