Cloud is omnipresent today, changing the IT landscape for small and medium businesses that were previously the domain of only large enterprises who had the money then to invest or at least experiment in a new IT infrastructure. Cloud technology is now both a technology differentiator and a business accelerator delivering exceptional experiences to customers, partners, and employees.
Tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google have focused heavily on cloud technologies enabling businesses to auto-scale at lower costs; IT is leaner, faster, and more productive. Cloud migration has been a game-changer for businesses large and small to help them stay ahead of the curve.
What is on-premises to cloud migration?
On-premises to cloud migration is the redeployment of your digital assets such as business applications, data, workloads, other business components, and storage from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud for better performance, agility, and security considerations. You can either choose the lift-and-shift (rehost) approach, where you can migrate without altering your applications, or go with the refactoring approach, where you restructure the application code to fit the new environment. Businesses need to consider a couple of things while undertaking a cloud migration: the compatibility of applications with the new environment and business continuity—without disruptions.
In an on-premises architecture, you own the physical server and software upon which you run your applications, workloads, or data warehouse. Cloud refers to both the underlying hardware and software used to run your business smoothly that are made available to you through the internet by a cloud service provider. Deploying your apps in the cloud unlocks limitless computing resources that can help scale your business apps seamlessly. Need more computer power or storage? It is ready on demand. The cloud offers you the platform and infrastructure you need to run your business and moves you from owning the server and the capital that requires to renting 10 or 100 servers based on your needs at the cloud provider’s data center.
So, what’s wrong with the on-premises server?
You may be reluctant about on-premises to cloud migration. After all, your applications and data on an on-premises server have worked and are safely in your control. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with in-house computing resources, but when cloud migration is done right, it outperforms all the benefits of the on-premises deployment and adds more value in terms of business agility, scalability, and performance.
Six key points to consider while planning on-premises to cloud migration
You need to plan about the migration of your digital assets and be prepared.
- Set migration objectives
Set clear goals and key performance metrics (KPIs) to ensure your on-premises to cloud migration makes sense. Analyze how cloud migration will perform against your expectations and measure uptime during high traffic spikes. Calculate your future scalable computing power needs and map that to the cloud migration process. Make sure it minimizes IT requirements and physical storage, providing significant cost savings.
- Choose your migration strategy
Choose the migration approach that best fits your business need, technical resources, and the degree of direct or indirect control you want to maintain. As mentioned earlier, you have a couple of approaches to move your business to the cloud:
- Lift your applications from the on-premises environment and shift them to cloud as-is or
- Leverage refactoring to take advantage of cloud capabilities, modify applications, and move them to the cloud
- Choose single or hybrid cloud
Make sure whether you want to run your applications on single or multiple clouds while planning for on-premises to cloud migration. Optimizing your applications to run on a single cloud is relatively simple as your applications can take advantage of everything your cloud provider offers. The only disadvantage of this approach is vendor lock-in. In a multi-cloud strategy, you split your applications across multiple cloud providers, which may increase the efficiency of application deployment. Still, it can also complicate your application development and validation process.
- Establish performance guidelines
Measure the pre-migration performance of your applications or service to determine if post-migration performance is acceptable. This process can help you diagnose any problems that may arise during the due course of your on-premises to cloud migration process. This could include data from a long-baseline period (such as a month or two) and data over critical or peak periods to validate the post-migration performance.
- Prioritize migration components
Decide whether you want to migrate your applications at once or component-by-component, or service-by-service. First, identify the connection between services and their dependencies. That will help you determine the order of application migration. For example, you might start migrating applications with fewer dependencies such as internal services and then migrate outermost services, the ones closer to your customers.
- Evaluate pricing
One of the critical factors in your on-premises to cloud migration checklist should be the budget because, like any other IT project, cloud migration is bound by it. Major cloud providers like Microsoft Azure have made the cloud more affordable for not only bigger organizations but also small and mid-sized companies through their pay-as-you-go pricing model. Check out their pricing calculator that will help you assess the cost involved in post-migration.
Choose PreludeSys for a successful on-premises to cloud migration
PreludeSys being a trusted Microsoft Gold Partner has successfully implemented on-premises to cloud migration projects for 50+ clients across a myriad of industries such as software, finance, retail, and healthcare on Azure cloud. Our engagement—which begins with an enterprise assessment—prioritizes innovation and scalability of appropriate technology solutions tailored to your requirements. We have an enviable track record of 100% timely delivery and 24×7 support.
Looking for on-premises to cloud migration solutions but don’t know where to start?
You can start with a relatively simple lift-and-shift approach and then refactor applications if needed. We know that each business is different. We understand your business first—how business operations are woven together—and then provide solutions that help move you to the cloud effortlessly without disruptions. Get in touch with us for your on-premises to cloud migration needs today!
