Best Practice for a Secure Cloud Migration
More and more organizations are adopting the cloud as their workloads increase. However, migration of enterprise legacy applications or re-hosting the infrastructure from the data center to the cloud is a complicated task. Even if they can successfully pull this off, they might end up operating the same system they’ve been using since day one. It is important to continuously enhance the infrastructure and adopt cloud design principles to utilize the best features introduced by cloud.
With the help of IT services in Bethesda and these best practices, you can make the migration to the cloud more successful.
- Identify a Migration Strategy
- Network Management
- Team Technical Expertise
- Access Management
- Take Little Steps
- Identify Repeated Items and Automate Them
A migration strategy is necessary when migrating your infrastructure and applications to the cloud. It starts with preparation and clear business justification before you could consider taking the big leap. To map out your migration plan, you can use the following:
Rehost – also known as the “lift and shift” strategy, this is used to perform a quick migration of their application to the cloud for business purposes.
Replatform – in this strategy, the core architecture remains the same, but it takes advantage of benefits of the cloud environment.
Repurchase – organizations decide to entirely move from one product to another to meet the current business requirements and leverage the latest features available.
Refactor/Re-architect – when your existing application fails to provide the features or performance your organization needs, you make modifications to the application, possibly including its architecture.
Retire – identifying assets and services that can be removed so the business can focus on more valuable and used services.
However, there is no rule that only one cloud strategy can be used. A key focus should be around the discovery of the resources and applications so the IT system’s data center can run without any bugs and lags. Once the discovery is complete, the next step is to determine what needs to be migrated and what can be disposed in order for the system to be updated. Organizations should look at the component elimination part of the re-platform strategy and identify the architecture components that can be replaced by IT services.
It is a best practice to design an entire cloud architecture before migrating the whole system. The cloud provides the capability to create a virtual private cloud or network and allows you to create subnets granted that you possess the necessary IP blocks, define IP addresses for the resources, and establish a healthy relationship in between. For the sake of functionality, the legacy application components should have the same IP address as the components, depending on the IP address for connection purposes.
For seamless migration and switchover, the resources are mapped to the same domain name and strong communication is established with stakeholders in case problems arise.
The team’s efficiency and skills are important for the success of an organization’s cloud migration journey. The end goal for the team remains the same—whether running on the cloud or data center—to create a smooth running process for the cloud migration.
The features introduced by the cloud, as well as its design principles are entirely different from on-premise, and it is essential to train and develop this skill set across teams (operations, development, design) so that they minimize any errors which could arise.
Enterprises can easily utilize a centralized security access mechanism to grant access to individuals who need to manage application processes. They enable functional role-based access to the team members. When using cloud services, accessibility should be managed carefully so that the teams can get the privileges they need to do their work. In addition, access governance policies should be observed as the part of the migration phase.
For the entire migration activity to be successful, it is always advisable to refrain from doing everything at once. Organizations should prioritize initially running a small application, come up with a migration plan, and integrate. It helps them to identify gaps so that they can refine their migration strategies. This activity will also aid in making the team more comfortable with cloud services so they can easily shift, thus allowing the stakeholders to see the benefits of the cloud migration.
Cloud automation allows us to build infrastructure and automatically run applications without any downtime. During the migration of multiple applications, organizations come across repeatable patterns, and it is safe to automate them as part of the migration process. It will reduce migration time, provide more consistency, and gives buffer time for teams to fix any downtime errors.
Swift Systems
If you want to deploy cloud computing solutions in your enterprise, let Swift Systems help you! We offer IT services in Bethesda to manage and store your resources in private, secure servers, and network structures. Discuss with us your company’s requirements.