What is cloud migration?

Posted by alvina on May 24th, 2018

Cloud migration service is the process of transferring the data or other business elements to a different cloud provider. This cloud migration also involves migrating the data elements between the cloud environments which is known as cloud-to-cloud migration.

The cloud migration can be successful by the use of cloud integration tool, which forms the middleware. It is used for bridging the gap between the technologies of the vendor and that of the customer.

Migration to cloud can be accomplished through the use of the following 6 common cloud migration strategies:

1. Lifting and shifting:

This is also known as the process of rehosting. Most of the applications need to be rehosted in a larger migrating scenario when an organization needs to implement migration as well as scaling to meet the business requirements. The use of tools such as AWS SMS can be used for automating the rehosting process. It can also be done manually to know the process of applying legacy systems to the cloud.

When applications run on the cloud, you can feel that they are easy to redesign which happens because of 2 reasons i.e development of better skills by the organization to meet the situation and if the migration of the application, data, and traffic is already done.

2. Lifting, tinkering, and shifting:

This is also known as the re-platforming process which needs fewer cloud optimizations for achieving some substantial benefit without causing any alterations in the application's core architecture. For instance, a database can be migrated to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) or a well-managed platform such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk to reduce the time spent managing the database instances

3. Dropping and shopping or repurchasing:

This is also known as the repurchasing process. Whenever an organization wants to alter the licensing model that is being currently used by it, it opts for moving to a different product. It has a feature for upgrading and smoother implementation when workloads which can to be upgraded to new version.

4. Refactoring or rearchitecting:

When there is a business requirement for adding new features or scaling, which can't be achieved in the current application environment, then this process is adopted.

Despite being an expensive solution, this process is preferably implemented when an organization needs to enhance its agility by migrating to a service-oriented architecture (SOA)

5. Retiring:

This process involves shutting down the non-essential IT assets after identifying them, in order to enhance the business case and focusing on the resources that are mostly used.

6. Retention:

There may be some applications which are being comfortably used in the current environment. Sometimes it might also happen that prioritizing a recently updated application and making alterations in it would not be convenient. Such an application in the IT portfolio can be retained instead of migrating.