Cloud migration project. Phases.

proyecto migracion a la nube

He cloud migration project It consists of a plan of migration solutions adapted to the needs of companies. This includes needs such as downsizing or exiting on-premises data centers, migrating existing workloads, modernizing apps, or abandoning another cloud to another provider.

The cloud migration and transformation services are a standard, repeatable approach with industry-leading migrations and application-specific tools that help customers optimize architectural design, planning, security, management and capabilities as they transform their workloads into the cloud.

Determining the cloud delivery method begins at the evaluation phase and often remains in the planning phase. In any exercise cloud migration, there are six options for migration, often referred to collectively as the 6Rs framework.

  Buyback (“Drop and Shop”)

This strategy involves tearing down the application and replacing it with a cloud-based version, which typically replaces legacy applications with SaaS. A small window is required for transition or migration.

  Rehost (“Lift and Shift”)

This strategy involves migrating applications from on-premise to the cloud without any changes. Typically used for large-scale migration of legacy applications to achieve specific business or operational goals, such as faster process execution time. The best place to lift and shift migration is to identify applications that can use cloud computing without making architectural changes. For example, applications with variable or seasonal loads can use the cloud without modifications in most cases. The cloud can make it easier to scale application tiers as needed, for example by adding web servers or database instances to a cluster.

  Replatform (“Lift and Shift”)

The platform upgrade strategy involves moving applications almost as-is and replacing some components where possible to take advantage of the cloud. In many cases, this means moving from traditional hosted infrastructure to managed services. Another common optimization is to move from commercial software (such as monitoring, patching, and configuration management tools) to open source software. This allows you to scale freely in the cloud without worrying about licensing costs for each additional instance.

  Refactoring

This strategy requires a complete update of the application to adapt it to the cloud. This is valuable when a company has a high need for cloud-based capabilities, such as improving flexibility, scalability, or development performance. In many cases, refactoring involves splitting the application into separate services and moving to a microservices architecture.

  Hybrid

Many organizations keep some of their resources on-premises and move only some of them to the cloud, creating a hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud benefits include maximizing the value of existing equipment in the on-premises data center, as well as the ability of organizations in certain industries to meet regulatory compliance requirements. Hybrid clouds are also useful for cloud-to-cloud backup (disaster recovery), where local data is backed up to the public cloud as a disaster recovery option if the local data center fails, in case the local data center becomes inoperable, as may occur in the event of fire, flood, or crime.

 

1. What is cloud migration?

The cloud migration is the movement of applications and data from one location, often from a company's local private servers ("on-premises") to the servers of a public cloud service provider, as well as between different clouds. The most important benefits of carry out a cloud migration project and switch to a service of this type are: reducing IT costs and improving efficiency, as well as information security, ease of use among other benefits.

1.1 Main benefits of migrating to the cloud

Scalability: Cloud computing can scale to support larger workloads and larger numbers of users more easily than on-premises infrastructure, which typically require businesses to purchase and configure additional physical servers, networking equipment, or software licenses.

Cost: Companies that move to the cloud often dramatically reduce the cost of IT operations as cloud service providers take care of maintenance and upgrades. Instead of focusing on keeping things up to date and operational, companies can direct more resources to their core business developing new products or improving existing ones.

Functioning: For some businesses, moving to the cloud can improve performance and the overall customer experience. If your app or website is hosted in cloud service centers instead of multiple on-premises servers, data doesn't have to travel as far to reach users and latency is reduced.

Flexibility: Users, whether employees or customers, can access the services and data they need from any cloud. This way, it is easier for the company to expand into new areas, offer its services to an international audience, and give employees flexibility in their work.

Backup, recovery and failover: Most cloud providers offer built-in, one-click functionality for backup recovery, including the ability to store backups across geographic regions.

Improved security: Public clouds make it easier to protect data and applications by providing built-in platform-level security as well as a variety of specialized security tools. In many cases, security patching is automatically handled by the cloud service provider.

Simplified administration and monitoring: If your cloud service provider offers a central management tool, it's easy to manage and monitor data center and cloud resources from a single screen.

 

2. Types of cloud servers

A cloud server It is a form of data hosting that works on a virtual network. These servers offer the same functions as a physical server, but They improve fundamental aspects such as transmission power or storage capacity and security.

2.1 How cloud servers work

He cloud operation It can be described simply: a company extracts resources from a hardware system and makes them available to users virtually.

In technical terms, the operation of the cloud server comprises two platforms:

  • Front-end: refers to hardware: computer or smart device; as well as the software: applications, interface or program, which a user requires to access the cloud.
  • Backend: refers to the architecture and infrastructure of cloud servers, as well as the company that manages the service.

2.2 Cloud server models

exist three service models What providers offer:

  Infrastructure as a service (Iaas): The provider provides the hardware system (underlying physical infrastructure), but companies manage the virtualization (software, applications, etc.)

  Platform as a Service (Paas): The service provider offers the computing platform, networks, servers and storage so that customers can focus on creating applications or services.

  Software as a service (Saas): Providers not only provide the physical base (own or contracted), but also manage the maintenance, operation and distribution of the software (applications and programs in the cloud) that users access from the network.

2.3 Types of cloud servers

According to the combination of the elements of architecture, we mention four types of cloud servers:

Public: the available resources are shared, in some cases free (although conditional) and are property of the service provider, who is also responsible for their management.

Private: In this case, the client acquires for exclusive use a certain amount of resources available (privately owned and managed) by the service provider. This is a custom cloud. In other cases, the company acquires its own servers to create and manage the cloud for the use of the organization itself.

Hybrid: This type of server combines resources from private (own or third-party) and public clouds, allowing organizations to migrate data and workloads according to technology and information needs.

Multicloud: This architecture takes advantage of different public cloud services, allowing you to take advantage of resources according to the company's requirements. It generally requires applications that allow management of the different clouds.

 

3. What is the reason why companies migrate to the cloud?

The cloud migration It allows companies to respond to growth and change by expanding or reducing infrastructure resources as needed without losing stability. 

3.1 The advantages of migrating to the cloud include:

 Elderly agility and flexibility

 Capacity for innovate faster

 Relief from rising resource demand

 Better management of the increase in customer expectations

 Costs reduction

 Deliver results immediate business

 Simplify IT

 Switch to everything as a service

 Better consumption management

 Cloud Scalability

 Improved performance

Improve the response times to support requests

 Business continuity

Boost the innovation

Outsource functions

Track progress

 

 

4. How to organize the cloud migration project?

Each company has different needs and, therefore, the cloud migration project It's slightly different. Cloud service providers can help companies set up their migration process. Most cloud migrations involve the following basic steps:

  1. To establish objectives: What operational improvements does the company expect? When does legacy infrastructure become obsolete? Setting measurable goals helps the company determine whether the transition went well or not.
  2. Create a security strategy: Cybersecurity in the cloud requires a different approach than on-premises security. In the cloud, corporate assets are no longer behind a firewall and the network perimeter is almost non-existent. It may be necessary to deploy a cloud firewall or web application firewall.
  3. Constantly copy data: Choose a cloud service provider and copy existing databases. This must be done continually during the migration process so that the cloud database remains up to date.
  4. Move business intelligence: This could involve refactoring or rewriting code. It can be done little by little or all at once.
  5. Shift production from on-premises to the cloud: the cloud is activated. The migration is complete.

Some companies deactivate their on-premises infrastructure at the end of these steps, while others may keep legacy systems in place as a backup, such as a disaster recovery, or as part of a hybrid cloud deployment.

 

5. Phases to migrate a project to the cloud.

There are different technical processes and recommended procedures for the cloud migration project for different workloads and for creating different cloud configurations, but all cloud migrations follow the same six basic phases:

 Define the strategy

Define the business case for the migration and the expected results.

 Plan

Align your cloud migration plan with your desired business outcomes.

 Get prepared

Prepare your on-premises environment and cloud environment for migration

 Migrate

Move workloads to the cloud environment.

 Government

Use benchmarks and implement security and cost governance best practices for your cloud environment and its workloads.

 Manage

Use proven methodologies for ongoing cloud solution management.

 

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