Why Migrate to the Cloud?
Cloud migration is the transition of traditional enterprise applications to a cloud environment, whether it be a public cloud, a private solution on-premises, or a hybrid, multi-cloud environment. Cloud computing helps you accelerate the delivery of new services and gain flexibility with on-demand resources. Cloud migration benefits include scalability, recovery, and accessibility, plus the potential for lower TCO. A well-planned cloud environment delivers:
- Flexible and scalable resources—critical as the need for resources quickly fluctuates with business demands.
- Greater control over costs with the ability to balance capital spending (CapEx) and operational spending (OpEx).
- Better disaster avoidance and recovery with a combination of available data backup and recovered data.
- Improved accessibility to data and applications at any time, anywhere.
It’s important to assess what your business needs, goals, and desired outcomes are when migrating to the cloud.
Considerations When Migrating to the Cloud
Your approach to cloud migration should take into account your business needs, goals, and desired outcomes. Key considerations include your deployment model, cloud service vendor offerings, and cost.
- A discovery tool designed to locate every device in your local network can help you understand which workloads are a good fit for a public cloud or private cloud.
- A managed service provider or other technology partner can help you explore potential scenarios without committing to a cloud service provider. This helps sort out which vendors are the most likely to provide the services you need.
- Working with your team or an adviser, assess the price per performance among cloud vendors.
- Manage a way to select and unselect specific services. This helps IT teams set up consistent workflow policies and automation.
- Set internal policies to ensure compliance with data privacy regulations.
- Evaluate the performance of key applications. This can help you plan your IT modernization efforts and adoption of new technologies, such as containers.
Cloud Migration Strategies Promote Flexibility
Migrating to the cloud can be flexible, whether you prefer to move all applications to a new environment or keep some as they are. The “Six Rs” refers to the common cloud migration strategy options.
| Strategy | Description |
|---|---|
| Rehosting | Also known as “lift and shift,” this involves moving data as is to a new environment. With rehosting, there are minimal changes to underlying applications, which could be beneficial for a quick move to the cloud. This strategy is common for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. |
| Replatforming | Also known as “lift, tinker, and shift,” this strategy involves making few changes to current applications and adopts a cloud-based database system or web server. This strategy is typically deployed as IaaS or PaaS. |
| Repurchasing | Usually deployed as Software as a Service (SaaS), this strategy switches legacy applications to newer, yet similar, applications on the cloud. Repurchasing essentially exchanges a workload to a fully cloud-hosted application and is mostly managed by a vendor. |
| Refactoring | Refactoring entirely changes and reengineers applications for cloud-based software. It requires a detailed business case analysis and development, test, and deployment plan. This strategy can use IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings. |
| Retaining | This migration strategy keeps applications as they are. It’s useful when applications are too critical to move or need considerable planning. It can also help businesses maximize their utilization of legacy infrastructure. |
| Retiring | Retiring involves the removal of inactive, limited use, or expensive applications. |
Cloud Migration Checklist
Before moving your data or applications to the cloud, assemble a team of stakeholders to set objectives and explore the potential strategies to optimize your use of the cloud.
- Define your goals. Get everyone on the same page about what your cloud environment should achieve in terms of cost management, data accessibility, and security.
- Assess your workloads. Take stock of your data and applications. Identify any requirements related to privacy or service quality.
- Plan your migration. Choose your deployment models and service providers.
- Roll out new services. Make sure that teams across your organization are ready to adopt new processes.
- Monitor and optimize. Telemetry tools can help you evaluate performance and decide when to make changes or infrastructure upgrades.
No matter which deployment model you choose, Intel can streamline cloud migration by providing a foundation of cloud-ready technology across public and private environments. Intel® technologies for the data center combine high-performance compute, innovative memory and storage, and sophisticated networking to offer complete cloud solutions. Supported by a broadly developed portfolio of advanced Intel® technologies, businesses can confidently scale and extend their workloads to any cloud-based environment.