Cloud adoption is something which organizations continue to have huge performance gains for over a decade. For organizations, migrating to cloud really means, eliminating the need for maintaining huge physical datacentres and the need for updating the server space to accommodate the huge data. As per a survey it is estimated that more than 70% of business have at least one application in the cloud. Today most of the business leaders believe moving to the cloud can significantly solve most of the business challenges. As most of the businesses are adopting serverless architecture, the majority of the infrastructure spends are on the cloud.
For most of the businesses across verticals, cloud is not just a desirable tool, but it is a business-critical necessity. IT has become a critical part of business strategy. An increasing number of business operations are supported by IT applications and services. The resulting explosion in applications and their underlying server, storage, and networking technology has placed a greater burden on IT staff.
As the market place transforms, enterprises are undergoing a radical shift in the way they create value and competitive edge. Cloud Services is an emerging approach to shared infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together in private and public networks to provide IT services.
Cloud adoption is gaining speed as organizations worldwide believe this will put them ahead of their competition. The immediate pull to cloud computing has reduced the total cost of ownership and less hardware for IT administrators to maintain.
Let's get deeper into Cloud Migration:
Cloud migration is commonly referred to as the process of moving enterprise workloads to a public or a private cloud. Migrating traditional businesses to the cloud involve the migration of technology, people and process. Generally, there are three types of cloud migrations one is enterprises moving their applications and data from an on-premises data centre to the cloud. Another type of migration is cloud to cloud migration, which means organizations move their workloads from one cloud platform to another. The third type of migration is reverse migration, moving back the workloads from cloud to the on-premise data centre.
The cloud migration journey is not the same for all the business, the complexity of migrating workloads to cloud depends on the no of resources involved in each application.
What can be migrated to cloud?, the answer is almost everything, right from the platforms for business services, network administration tools, CRM support systems, enterprise databases, web/mobile applications, SD-WAN, productivity software, remote desktops, edge servers, IoT and more.
All the top public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle and IBM cloud offer businesses with a high-speed internet connection that means they can run their applications at a faster pace. These cloud vendors are also providing application support for web development, programming and mobile apps.
Cloud Migration Process:
Migrating to the cloud is a great strategic move for the organizations as it offers many benefits such as application scalability and reduced IT costs. Following are the few prerequisites involved while migrating to the cloud
· IT Infrastructure Audit
· Identifying the existing issues and designing the solution for them
· Designing a migration plan
· Designing the optimal cloud infrastructure
· Completing a pilot project in parallel with the legacy processes to test the system
· Improving the infrastructure based on the pilot project feedback and outcomes
· Moving the system components to cloud
· Configuring the CI/CD pipelines, cloud monitoring, logging and altering solutions
Benefits of Cloud Migration:
1. Cost Saving
When compared to a physical data centre, the cost incurred for the cloud is very less. Operational expenses are also very low as services like Saas and PaaS will take care of the upgrades and maintenance of data centres. As a dedicated technical team is not necessary for the data centre management, organizations can save on human resource cost as well.
2. Flexibility
Cloud migration allows organizations to anytime expand its businesses or even withdraw few services from cloud, based on its necessity hybrid cloud solutions such as AI, Machine Learning (ML), and image processing, are the newest technology trends which enable organizations in effectively expanding its business operations.
3. Higher Resource Availability
By moving organizations data to the cloud, there will be a substantial rise in resource availability. This will help organizations to have better resource utilization, leading a way to enhanced customer satisfaction.
4. Auto Updates
System updates require prolonged analysis and are a tedious task for IT staff. By migrating to the cloud, organizations need not worry about system updates, as most of the cloud migration plans include ready to go software updates. So the system updates are automatically taken care by the cloud providers.
5. Enhanced Security
Over 90% of the businesses across the world find enhancement in their security, after migrating to cloud. Cloud providers offer robust security mechanism for the organizations, it offers better control on data access, as it strictly restricts unauthorized user access.
6. Ensuring Business Continuity
Business continuity is a major factor that contributes to business success, today even a few minutes of downtime also cannot be spared. Cloud providers offer a very quick disaster recovery from any natural disasters or power outages.
7. Agility
Procuring new inventory and storage space is very easy with cloud migration, it can be done in a day or even hours. With this, the organizations will have greater agility to adapt to newer technology environments.
8. Higher Visibility
With higher visibility of data, organizations can take timely decisions.
9. Quality Control
Cloud platforms allow organizations to store all their documents in one place and in the same format. This allows consistency in data and to mitigate human errors and can easily track the updates or revisions made on the documents.
10. Operational Efficiency
With cloud migration services come the simplicity in cloud solutions. The ease of use makes teams in companies more productive. Even when it comes to distributed teams, the cloud manages to remove region-specific dependencies. This helps in the creation of a collaborative team setting.
11. Mobility
Access to business information and necessary data is enabled from anywhere and from any device. Today as pandemic hit the world we all understood the need for a cloud to access the organization data from the comfort of our home, without compromising on data security.
12. Continuous Monitoring
Most of the cloud service providers are offering monitoring services for organization critical applications and machine. This enables organizations to get notified on potential issues as soon as the issue occurs. By this, the IT teams can immediately remediate the problem.
13. Increased Collaboration
Cloud migration makes collaboration an easy process. Over cloud-based platforms, employees can securely and easily view and share organization information some organizations are also adopting cloud-based collaborative social space for employee engagement.
14. Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are the latest trends in Cloud migration. Which enables organizations to gain advanced analytical insight on their data. to know more on the latest cloud trends Read our blog
15. Expertise
Services based on industry-specific skills is a game-changer in cloud industry. Today most of the cloud providers are customizing their services according to the industry requirements. These services are articulated as per the specific guidelines which pertain only to a particular industry.
Mounika Raghavarapu September 30, 2020
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