How to Migrate to the Cloud Quickly and Flawlessly Using Accelerators

iMigrate^TM, Innominds’ own accelerators, helps enterprises shift strategically and pragmatically to the cloud.

As enterprises rapidly adopt cloud migration services as the foundation of their digital transformation initiatives, they must consider the most effective way to migrate to the cloud. Speed, eventual cost reduction, and scalability are the major impetuses behind this pivotal decision. But that’s all been said and done.

Now, the focus has been shifted to how an organization can accelerate the cloud migration journey without running into common errors. Let’s look at the ways in which your organization can shift to cloud, through tried and tested methods and processes involves the 6R approach and it uses our home-grown cloud accelerator platform, iMigrate, for a smoother transition to the cloud.

The 6R approach to cloud migration

The 6R approach to the cloud is one of the most practical routes to cloud migration, crafted by Gartner and later modified by AWS. Innominds uses the same sensible methodology in achieving the right momentum for the entire migration process.

“If you have not developed a cloud-first strategy yet, you are likely falling behind your competitors,”. Gartner’s VP of Analytics quotes this just right as new ways to embrace the cloud are innovated every year.

1. Rehost (“Lift and Shift”)

   This step involves switching an application to the cloud without making architectural changes. The same application will be made to reside in the cloud. The migration will not be of any value until some changes are made to the application later in the process. The ‘lift and shift’ step does not involve making such architectural changes to the application. Changing an application after migrating to the cloud is deemed better when considering the objective reality of the development and production environment. But migration without changes will extract no benefits from the rehosting, other than data replication.

   Therefore, in the event of a datacentre closure, say, due to a natural disaster, this process of ‘lift and shift’ is very practical. This process can also be automatically set up. The easiest applications that need shifting can be the first ones to be migrated. They require the least effort and cost to migrate.

2. Re-platform (“Lift, Tinker and Shift”)

   Re-platforming has become more advanced over the last few years and is considered a better option to rehosting although it is slower. Re-platforming means making small changes to the application, i.e., ‘tinkering’, when the migration is performed. This is a better option because we take advantage of some components while making this migration and the application can be made viable on the cloud. Ideally again, these applications would need only small changes made to them.

   Re-platforming gets rid of operational difficulties by switching to managed services where the pricing is based on consumption. This gives plenty of opportunities to scale and move nimbly from rigid systems. Re-platforming will be done to a containerized platform or multi-cloud or even serverless as per preferences. As the architectural changes will be minimal, re-platforming is different from re-factoring which we will discuss next.

   This option saves money and effort in that we get a minimum viable product in the cloud where there are options to switch from expensive software to open-source platforms.

3. Refactor/Re-architect

   Refactoring involves a complete overhaul of the application’s architecture. This step is utilized when an organization feels like they are ready to move to the cloud for operational ease, management, cost-effectiveness, availability and scalability. The application will need an architectural change and will need to be tested before it can be made live again.

   To summarize, refactoring is slower and requires an effort from the managed services and in-house operations in order to gain the full benefits of a cloud managed platform.

   Refactoring can provide an improved user experience with new and improved components while getting rid of any tinge of legacy interaction.

4. Repurchase (“Drop and Shop”)

   Repurchasing will be easy in terms of the time spent as this is essentially just a license change. You can purchase a cloud license in the place of an on-premise license. You ‘drop’ the old licence and engagement, to ‘shop’ for a new one.

   As implied, ‘shopping’ for anything new is a pricey venture. Repurchasing incurs a heavier cost due to this major shift. However, it will pay out in the long-term in terms of maintenance costs and ease of handling business, and even caters to expansion plans. It also offers a make-over to your applications.

5. Retire

   Cloud migration strategies not only involve application migrations but also identifying the applications that don’t need to be moved. About 10-20% of enterprise IT portfolio is said to be no longer used and these can be ignored in the migration process. Therefore, this step becomes a general audit of how many applications reap benefits and how many could become obsolete with improvement to existing apps with cloud features.

6. Retain

   Retaining certain applications will be a decision based on performance and cost. There should be a general consensus on what applications will get the maximum benefits out of the cloud migration.

   There may be other reasons as to why some applications are not cloudified. Some applications drive optimal performance for which an on-premise set-up might be most suited. Some applications might be working well on-premise and don’t need the added cost of migration with the loss of time and required effort.

These strategies for cloud migration are the main considerations for those looking at it from an administrative point of view. Many companies were able to cut down on resources while moving to the cloud because legacy applications may have many dependencies that are eliminated by cloud. Companies can also gain ease of operability where they previously relied on heavy management and maintenance. These days, each cloud provider is competing with the other to provide the maximum benefits to their native adopters. They often offer a wide variety of freebies for customers who stay loyal to them.

A cloud migration accelerator like iMigrate^TM can highlight these specialities of each cloud service provider, helping you navigate through the overwhelming number of offers that are present in the market today.

Risks and difficulties

Cloud has been established as a differentiator in the software development and services sector. Many applications present themselves with improved cloud capabilities which increases the value of their products and the expansion of services across locations.

However, sometimes even when an organization moves to the cloud, their backend teams might not have adapted to the new formulae of learning the processes involved. There are again challenges associated with how well the operations team may have prepared themselves to face the risks involved in cloud application and data management. The benefits always need to outweigh the difficulties, and cloud education needs to be part of the training curriculum.

Organizations should also look at the consumption of cloud infrastructure for each service and optimize it to save cost. This may also be a part and parcel of each cloud provider where again you may need an additional set of eyes traversing these known points.

Other major factors in cloud migrations with iMigrate^TM accelerators

iMigrate not only works on the strategies for cloud migrations but also several other factors that need to be accounted for while migrating. Our team of experts takes all these points as necessary to make an organization make the best of cloud, with improved DevOps, SecOps, data migrations, and several others. Let us take a look at each one of these:

1. Infrastructure and hardware

   Innominds’ cloud accelerator platform takes a closer look at each of the elements that are part of the migration of an entire organization. We take a look at all the existing hardware and how we can move them to the cloud. Every part of the infrastructure may need a placement in different parts of the cloud. The control of these hardware components may need to be optimized according to their practical implications.

2. Security

   Security is again a key area of consideration when moving to the cloud since cloud application residence is extremely privy to data risks. This is evident from the amount of data privacy issues cropping up after applications are move to the cloud.

   A survey surrounding the Palo Alto network of companies discovered that around 51% of organizations publicly exposed at least one of their services.

   Then again, Gartner says, “By 2022, 95% of security failures are predicted to be the customer’s fault”.

   So, it seems like there is no better option than to undertake security measures from the ground up, because the service providers can make stricter regulations to data security. Each and every customer may not be educated in what makes their account more secure.

   On that note, migrating data is the next step that we consider when working with an organization.

3. Data migration:

   iMigrate^TM has several utilities and scripts that can sniff out challenges and look at the landscape of data sources. Accordingly, we provision for similar data infrastructure. Data migration involves moving data to the respective data sources on the cloud.

   We also have several security and compliance undertakings with the right tooling. GDPR compliances and policies are usually advised from an early stage, and we adhere to these standards from our own utilities galore.

   We follow a configuration-driven approach for this, relying on cloud-native AWS and Azure tools.

4. App migrations

   Application migrations follow the standard 12-factor approach. We connect the apps to the cloud. The move to the cloud depends largely on customer preferences here. Depending on which approach an individual company might opt for we follow that same prerogative. An organization can either chose cloud-native or cloud agnostic approaches.

   Applications are also required to be run through scans that will give more information on its working and dependencies which may need to be shifted along to the cloud. Scans will be able to draw a network diagram to tell us what resources there may be that these applications are talking to. As a result, these resources should also be made available in the cloud.

   These processes will have covered the core cloud migrations part. However, the process does not stop there. Similar to what we saw with the 6R approach, there are additional passive steps that form the entire cloud migration accelerator process.

5. CI/CD enablement

   After everything has been moved to the cloud, we look at ways to improve and implement optimizations to the components and apps. iMigrate^TM accelerator has its own scripts based on Terraform, ARM, or AWS Cloud Formation. Depending on which applications you want to move, we may leverage any of these scripts to do the job.

   Sometimes, there may be situations in which the customers or a particular organization might not want to work with a certain cloud provider. In these situations, there is provision to take a cloud native approach. There may be situations where a certain organization prefers to move to a different service provider than what they had chosen. That is also possible with the flexible capabilities of iMigrate^TM.

6. Operational excellence

   Operational excellence is tailing the rest of the procedures in making the app easy to use, configure and monitor over time. There are several tools that we run on the architecture to make this possible. There may also certainly arise instances where several resources become unusable or unnecessary. In such cases, iMigrate^TM’s services can point it out. It may be wise to get rid of these extra resources resulting in saving of space and also cutting down costs significantly.

   Additionally, there could be many improvements that will be suggested as part of the operational excellence. These make the migrated applications perform the best in an environment. DevOps principles and philosophies can be employed to modernize the application with containerization, and orchestration tools.