For many companies, the prospect of moving to cloud services comes with a question: Why now?

It makes sense: If current technologies and processes are working as intended, why upset the digital apple cart by introducing new frameworks and functions that could temporarily impact performance? In practice, however, sticking with legacy solutions comes with five substantial drawbacks.

Technology Sprawl

In an on-premises environment, technology sprawl is par for the course. It starts simply enough: Teams implement a new solution to solve a department-specific problem. Other teams, meanwhile, adopt slightly different solutions to solve similar problems, leading to a host of solutions running in parallel and completely cut off from one another. This leads to the downstream issue of siloed information, in turn creating a paradox: Efforts to deploy new technologies ASAP lead to reduced efficacy over time.

High Maintenance Costs

Keeping applications and data close to home offers the benefit of control but also comes with significant, ongoing maintenance costs. Here’s why: Hardware, software, and software licenses must be continually managed, maintained, and upgraded. Consider a server reaching end-of-life. Not only do companies need to purchase a replacement but ensure all data and software make the move intact, in turn costing time and money.

Performance Problems

Legacy tools and technologies simply aren’t designed to make the best use of cloud frameworks. This creates a situation where performance is naturally capped by the physical and digital constraints of existing tools.

Security Challenges

Cybersecurity is constantly evolving as attackers look for new ways to compromise corporate systems. In a cloud environment, new security updates can be automatically applied to reduce total risk. On-premises, however, gaps in hardware or software security could provide routes for critical compromise.

Scalability Issues

On-premises hardware comes with fixed capacity. If companies want to scale up available storage or compute resources, it requires the purchase and installation of new hardware. In some cases, legacy systems don’t support this type of horizontal scaling, meaning companies may need to entirely replace current hardware.

Depending on what you plan to move and where you plan to move it, different migration strategies offer differing benefits. Here, four broad approaches are common.

Rehosting

Also known as “lift and shift”, this migration approach sees companies moving applications and associated data to the cloud. This process is typically handled by IT departments and uses infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions offered by cloud service providers (CSPs) to accomplish the goal.

Replatforming

Sometimes called “lift and reshape”, this strategy involves moving functions to the cloud without rewriting core architecture. For example, companies might choose to migrate their on-prem database or storage to the cloud using platform-as-a-service (PaaS) options.

Refactoring

Refactoring, or rewriting, is the process of migrating apps to the cloud by rewriting them to meet cloud-native standards. While this process requires significant time and cost investment up-front, it can offer long-term benefits if done correctly.

Repurchasing

Also called replacing, repurchasing moves both applications and data to a cloud-native product using software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.

When it comes to cloud migration, there’s no one-size-fits-all framework. Depending on your current state of cloud adoption, your preference for public, private, or hybrid environments, and your existing budget for the move, what the shift looks like for your organization should be reflective of what you need, not what other companies are doing. In other words, it’s not worth adopting the cloud simply for cloud’s sake.

While the result of cloud deployment looks different for every company, there are commonsense processes that can help streamline the shift.

1) Assess Your Needs

The first step in cloud migration is figuring out what you need and why you need it. Here, six questions can help set the stage.

1. Why do you want to move?
2. What are your objectives?
3. What are your ROI goals?
4. How old is your current infrastructure?
5. What is your timeline for migration?
6. Do you want to retrain staff or hire a third party?

Taking the time to answer these questions helps establish a firm foundation for your cloud move.

2) Evaluate What You’ve Got

Next, you need to evaluate what hardware, software, and other technology solutions you currently have and how they factor into cloud moves. This includes identifying potential components for migration, pinpointing which tools and data need to stay in-house, and analyzing application dependencies to understand the impact of changes on your IT environment at scale.

3) Select Your Migration Strategy

Depending on your current needs and components, select the migration strategy that makes sense for your organization. For example, if you have legacy applications that contain valuable data but can’t operate in the cloud, consider repurchasing. If you have more modern databases that support cloud functions, consider rehosting or replatforming.

4) Choose Your Components

What are you going to move, and what’s staying close to home? By preselecting the components you want to move and conducting an audit of component interdependencies, you can streamline the migration process.

5) Prepare Cloud Infrastructure

Using migration services from CSPs can help prepare cloud infrastructure in advance with prebuilt environments and controls. It’s also a good idea to create backup and recovery plans in case cloud moves encounter issues.

6) Backup, Test, and Pilot Your Migration Plan

Before making the move, back up your existing system. Then, test all components for potential dependency conflicts or performance problems. Finally, pilot your move in a cloud test environment to identify and eliminate friction points.

7) Migrate and Manage the Move

With components selected and environments tested, it’s time to make the move. Best bet? Opt for slow and steady over fast and furious. Incremental migration may take longer but also provides the opportunity to make changes as needed. Once migration is complete, perform a detailed analysis to ensure performance, security, and stability are as expected.

Need help making the shift from on-prem to the cloud or integrating new cloud applications and environments across current IT stacks? See how PDG Consulting can help.