6 Essential Steps to Cloud Adoption!

Cloud migration is a critical step to most, if not all, businesses. They must be flexible in their IT transformation tactics when developing flexible and agile business systems like customer resource management (CRM) systems, storage systems, intricate process automation, and leveraging social media and mobile technologies. Without a structured cloud adoption strategy, businesses risk "cloud sprawl," increasing costs and raising compliance and security concerns.

Want to assist your CIO in developing a cloud strategy that satisfies business objectives while keeping operations running smoothly? Consider these 6 essential steps to a clear and unified cloud adoption strategy.

• Build a roadmap for migration: Prioritizing applications for migration is one of the biggest challenges businesses encounter when shifting to the cloud. There are several options to take here; for example, you can identify your low business effect applications first, then medium, and then high impact applications. Initially, you may prioritize your low business impact applications. Whatever strategy you choose, you must examine application architectures, comprehend application dependencies, identify risks, and move with a clear plan.
  
  It's debatable whether to move off-the-shelf programs to the cloud or keep them in the organization's data center. The key to cost savings is elasticity. Cloud migration should be prioritized for applications with highly variable consumption (commonly referred to as "bursty" apps). Otherwise, you're either paying for on-prem resources you don't need anymore, or you're trying to expand your VM capacity or finding another way to develop your infrastructure.

• Cloud setup: You should identify the resources you'll need to administer your cloud applications once you've established a clear strategy. Run performance counters to discover peak loads on CPU, IO, Network, and Storage for programs you want to move without any modification. Based on this information, choose the best cloud instances. 
  
  Make sure to figure out which license strategy is best for your company. Pay-as-you-go models may provide flexibility but reserving instances for a one or three-year period will save you money if you can forecast your need for the year. You may also purchase through a cloud service provider, which can give added value and cost benefits.
  
  Be aware of all possible alternatives when moving data utilizing cloud-native technologies like SQL Azure or AWS RDS. Consider how you'll link on-premises to the cloud and your bandwidth and service level requirements before selecting the "best-fit" solutions.

• Outline the migration process model: Align your migration strategy with your specific process and personalize it for each customer. The first stage in migrating is to set up your subscriptions or accounts in your preferred public cloud, as well as the appropriate identity and access policies (for example, IAM roles in AWS and Azure AD in Azure), which include:
  • Using identity and access management to design the best-fit governance model
  • Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) design and implementation
  • Putting in place conditional access policies
  • Creating the necessary resource groups and regulations for resource tagging.

• Make a refactoring plan: Refactoring may be required as you move your workloads, especially if you are using apps or services that are no longer maintained. Consider the case where your apps use databases, authentication, or business services that aren't supported. In that situation, you could choose to refactor those apps to use similar cloud services from the same or different providers. It would also assist if you refactored your applications to use containers. Refactoring your apps makes it easier for your company to grow and manage microservices while also increasing agility.

• Create Managed Services: Following the migration, a defined post-migration transition back to day-to-day operations, including assistance, is required. Additionally, having proactive monitoring and response levels to guarantee that everything is running smoothly will be well worth your time. After moving the VMs/Applications, the next step is to manage them. You'll need a "single-pane-of-glass" deployment at this point, with visibility, governance, monitoring, and control of all VMs/Apps, as well as a cloud environment (e.g., Microsoft Azure or AWS) and traditional infrastructure (hosted/data center/on-premises). The management of cloud services differs from the management of on-premises infrastructures.

• Optimize the environment: Optimization is the final step in the cloud migration lifecycle. Organizations must continuously monitor their resources after all applications/VMs have been migrated and relocated to managed services to ensure optimal productivity, security, and compliance. Like all great adventures, a roadmap is essential for arriving at your destination promptly and safely. Also, to be sure you're getting the most out of your cloud subscription!

Following these 6 simple cloud migration procedures will help you plan every step of the process and anticipate the unexpected.

Over the last few years, Exalogic Consulting has worked with numerous customers and performed several workload migrations to SaaS / PaaS / IaaS models. We are drawing on our extensive knowledge and know-how to overcome a diverse set of migration challenges quickly and cost-effectively.

Ready to move to the cloud? Visit our website and discover more about the best ways to accelerate your cloud migration efforts and reduce the time to value for your organization and its customers.