To many businesses, a fast and painless migration to the cloud isn’t impossible — it’s practical and achievable. Cloud migration doesn’t need to be a long, drawn-out, complex process.
With the right cloud hosting partner, an integration platform as a service (iPaaS), and a plan, most businesses and even some larger companies can smoothly transition from on-premises to the cloud.
This brief guide will outline the steps a business needs to follow to move critical data, apps and processes out of on-premises silos and into the unified business cloud. Plus, we’ll offer a few tips on how an iPaaS can expedite the process and get businesses back to peak operations more quickly.
Cloud Migration Phase 1: Align Data, Software, and Operations Needs
Every big decision benefits from planning. You can’t start migrating data and apps and expect everything to go smoothly without a well-devised plan. Start with a roadmap — one that clearly illustrates the path from on-premises data storage to a cloud solution. Here are the most important items your plan needs to address:
- Financial assessment (server, storage, network costs)
- Security and compliance planning (cybersecurity, data backups)
- Technical/functional assessment (which apps and data are cloud-ready and which aren’t)
Here, the foremost items to consider are budgeting for the migration and ensuring you know what assets are set up for the cloud, versus which legacy apps and resources may need hybrid solutions, such as an iPaaS. Also, be sure to perform a security and governance gap assessment, measuring your data-handling practices against Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) standards. This is a good way to figure out if you’re in a position to consider on-premises-to-cloud migration in the first place.
These are the primary assessment items, but they’re far from the only factors you should account for. How much downtime or data unavailability should you plan around? Do you have a cloud migration partner? You’ll want to have answers to these questions and others before you consider how to migrate to the cloud.
For most organizations, Phase 1 should take place before your migration window. Encountering obstacles during the planning phase allows you to get your business cloud-ready, and migrate with confidence when the time finally comes.
Cloud Migration Phase 2: Digital Inventory and Migration Planning
Once you’ve determined your business is cloud-ready, it’s time to start the clock and shift your tools from on-premises to the cloud. What’s your first step? Start forming connections and delegating tasks. Phase 2 breaks down into three main parts:
Inventorying apps, data, and digital assets
Create a digital inventory of everything that’s moving to the cloud. This is important for ensuring the migration is 1:1. Everything in your current on-premises solution needs to have a home in the cloud. Inventorying gives you a big picture of total assets and allows your migration partner to “re-home” these assets in the cloud.
Mapping current on-premises systems to the cloud
It’s important to get a handle on how your various on-premises systems work, as well as how they interact together. As these assets move to the cloud, you’ll need to replicate these functions or risk upending your entire ecosystem. Thankfully, most cloud services providers offer integrative technologies and processes for mimicking the on-premises environment. And for everything that doesn’t make a seamless transition, there’s iPaaS.
Delegating responsibilities according to the timeline
Who’s setting up the cloud databases? Who handles app integrations and networking? Take the roadmap you created in Phase I and break it down into individual tasks, delegating them to teams and even individuals to create accountability during the move.
All told, Phase 2 can take anywhere from a few days to a week, depending on the size of the company and the scope of its migration.
Cloud Migration Phase 3: Run a Pilot for Your Implementation Strategy
Planning is the first safeguard against failure; testing is the second. By this point, you’ve got everything ready to go for the big move — assets inventoried, tasks delegated, compliance boxes checked, and so on. The only thing left to do is make sure you choose a migration approach and test it. Here, there are two primary schools of thought.
Lift-and-shift
This is the “pick it all up and move it to the cloud” approach. There’s no redesign needed because your data structure is already compliant with the cloud architecture. If your assets are pretty much all cloud-ready and you’re set up for one big marathon migration, this is the approach for you.
The pros are quickness and simplicity. It takes very little time or effort to lift and shift data from an on-premises solution to a business cloud. The drawback is that your freshly-moved assets won’t sync up with cloud services from the get-go — you’ll eventually need to re-architect to capitalize on those services.
Hybridization and re-architecting
This process offers a bit of a shortcut — it focuses on moving cloud-ready assets and establishing temporary connections for legacy software that’s not structured for the cloud.
In many cases, businesses with legacy apps benefit from an iPaaS to establish this hybrid connection between remaining on-premises apps and migrated assets.
The con here is time. Your total cloud migration will take longer than the lift-and-shift approach; however, you’ll still get the benefits of the cloud thanks to your iPaaS. It just takes time to refactor apps and workflows. The good news is, you’ll buy yourself enough time to properly re-architect on-premises assets so they’re fully and properly integrated in the cloud environment — which means leveraging native cloud services.
Choose your cloud migration strategy and test it
Will it be lift-and-shift or a hybridization migration? Whichever option you pick needs testing before you execute the full migration. Pick a small segment of your total migration to test — something non-essential, yet important enough to warrant testing.
Most companies start with analytics data. You might also start with a relatively siloed app or workflow. Kick it into the cloud, make sure it’s structured accordingly and test the efficacy of the migration. Can you access your data or app? Does it function as you expect? Is it accessible, available, and secure?
If you walk away from your strategy sessions and tests feeling confident, you’re ready to kick the tires on a full migration. Phase 3 will likely take another week or so, which leaves you with roughly one more week (or 10 days) to execute the on-premises to cloud migration.
Cloud Migration Phase 4: Implementing Your Migration
This is it: the moment of truth. Everything up until this point has been quality assurance — a hedge against errors in the migration and integration process. Now’s the time to begin shifting your assets to the cloud, and you’ve got some options for execution:
- Live migration occurs when you move an active application or live data from on-premises to the cloud in real-time, with no disruption to accessibility.
- Server cloning is a one-time migration of an entire server to the cloud. The server needs to be shut down during this process, so plan for downtime.
- Data migration synchronizes data between various file formats and sends it to the cloud, where it’s appropriately cataloged.
- VM conversion converts a Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) into a cloud-factored format, where data is transferred via API.
Depending on the mode of transfer and the quantity of digital assets moving to the cloud, these protocols can take anywhere from a couple of hours to a full day to execute. Clone hosting, for example, is very straightforward and speedy. Live migration, on the other hand, requires a lot of effort and takes much longer. There are pros and cons to each, and it’s best to work with a migration partner to figure out which migration protocol fits where.
The migration itself will take different amounts of time for different organizations. The larger your migration, the more time it will take. Smaller companies can likely tackle a full migration in 5-7 days; larger businesses may take up to two weeks to get it all ported over. These timelines are less realistic for large, distributed enterprises.
Cloud Migration Phase 5: Testing and Finalization
There’s no such thing as too much testing.
After your migration is complete, spend a day or two putting your new cloud infrastructure through its paces. Run through common workflows. Play around with different databases and integrations. Set up, configure, or get to know cloud monitoring tools and use them to get application-level insights.
Most importantly, start looking for opportunities to optimize.
What most companies don’t realize is that cloud migration is the penultimate task in leveraging the cloud — optimizing and growing your cloud integrations is the goal. Experiment with cloud services, leverage an iPaaS to enhance integrations, and start looking for ways to automate.
If you’re wondering how to optimize your migration to the cloud, this is it! With a little pre-planning and careful consideration for due process, it’s not only possible, it’s practical. For more information around key insights and integration strategies for success, check out our guide: “The Integration Checklist for Cloud Migration”.