As of 2022, over 60 percent of corporate data is housed in the cloud, compared to 30 percent in 2015. A successful cloud migration lowers costs, increases scalability, and dramatically reduces the chance of a cyberattack that might destroy your company. However, without the right approach, moving to the cloud may come with instability, cost, and security concerns.

What are the things to consider before cloud migration, and how to avoid pitfalls when migrating an application to cloud?
In this post, we will briefly define cloud migration, key factors to consider before moving to the cloud, how to find the right cloud provider, calculate realistic costs and timelines, and choose the strategy for application cloud migration. Finally, we will discuss how Techstack development company can help you with migrating applications to the cloud.

What is Cloud Migration?

The process of partially or entirely migrating a company's digital assets, services, databases, tech resources, and applications into the cloud environment is known as cloud migration. Cloud to cloud migrations and cloud server migration are both parts of it. Your company can gain significantly from the data migration cloud, but you must consider numerous factors.

Here are some things to think about before you migrate to cloud computing.

Determine Why Your Business Needs to Move to the Cloud

Before moving to cloud migration steps, think about why your business needs it. Identify

which processes in your company can benefit from migration. Finding out what's in it for you is crucial. The arguments for moving to the cloud range from improved tech performance to enhanced security.

Here are some examples of why to move to the cloud.  

  • Maximizing use—for instance, using a cloud-based call center or call recording software.
  • Improving functionality and interoperability with other systems.
  • Fostering seamless teamwork—you should do this without a doubt, because these benefits can result in significant boosts in production.

Most businesses choose migration to cloud computing to switch from a private server or regional, on-premises data center to a cloud architecture for their data, applications, and information. To understand why businesses move to the cloud and how to do it right, let’s look at the benefits and challenges of cloud migration.

Benefits of Cloud Migration.

  • Cost optimization. Data migration to the cloud brings considerable reductions in resource, maintenance, and physical property expenditures.
  • Flexibility. Organizations can change their resources instantaneously and on-demand in response to demand fluctuations or when they need more powerful computing resources.
  • Scalability. Many businesses choose a hybrid cloud strategy. This means some workloads go to the cloud, while others remain in their current on-premises environment. This balance allows further to reap the benefits of their current tech expenditures.
  • Enhanced security. To help ensure that an organization's resources are safeguarded, many public clouds come with built-in security features and specialized cloud security solutions. The DevSecOps approach helps to deliver reliable and secure systems by integrating security measures at every level of the software development lifecycle.
  • Unlocking digital business. Cloud helps to overcome common tech challenges like poor time to value, resource limitations, and incompatible systems.
  • Reducing the burden of maintaining hardware. The cloud can make operating and maintaining hardware and software more manageable.
  • Compliance. For highly regulated businesses like finance, healthcare, and government, specific cloud platforms feature specialized capabilities that effortlessly meet compliance needs.
  • Backup and recovery capabilities. Most cloud service providers offer built-in, one-click backup and recovery features, which enhance business continuity. Additionally, some services let you store backups in various locations.
  • Streamlined oversight. Organizations can monitor their on-premises data center and cloud resources from a single screen if the cloud provider provides a central management tool.

Challenges of Cloud Migration.

  • Planning. More so than the relatively simple process of migrating individual workloads to the cloud, a large-scale migration requires substantial preparation across the organization.
  • Cost. Migrating applications to the cloud will require time, money, and resources, but it can increase ROI in the short and long term.
  • Business downtime. Although migrating enormous volumes of data to the cloud can be accomplished quickly, it requires careful preparation to reduce business interruptions.
  • Adoption and training within the organization. Although most of the abilities that developers already possess apply to the cloud, additional skill development is still required.

Now that you know the main benefits and challenges of cloud migration, you can put them together and see what you need to make a balanced choice.

Manage Location, Security, and Data Transfer

You are in charge of your and your clients’ data. Migration to cloud computing requires you to always be aware of the location of data and ensure its security. Data security is a crucial concern for several industries, such as the legal and financial sectors.

Stay aware of both the locations of data and the policies that control it. It is essential to comply with legal data regulations, such as GDPR, and know whether or not the government monitors your data when you migrate data to cloud.

You must first match applications' governance and security requirements with the security features of your potential cloud platforms to ensure that your data is managed appropriately. This is necessary to guarantee that your applications and data are secured yet remain completely accessible and auditable.

Make sure you can always control access to data as your next step. As a result, you should manage who uses what services and how often. Costs associated with the cloud won't skyrocket in this way.

Another cloud migration challenge is data transfer. Your business information is not static, but is constantly changing. Therefore, you need to think of a solution to migrate data to the cloud more than once. It is vital to set up a constant data transfer process for the entire cloud migration period. If you lack such a process, your business may face data loss, inconsistencies, and other errors.

Define What Roles Your Team Needs for Cloud Migration

There is no unique standard of whom to include in your cloud migration team. Still, there are some positions that you can’t go without when migrating to the cloud.

Cloud Architect.

Teams involved in data migration to the cloud need architects to design and construct cloud environments and migration strategies. In essence, this expert creates the technical architecture to use. Some required competencies include DevOps and tech infrastructure engineering, and cybersecurity.

Cloud Engineer.

Cloud engineers are distinct from software developers as they create, implement, and oversee the storage and systems in the cloud. They build the programs consumers use to access, save, and retrieve data from server networks. To ensure everything is functioning correctly, they configure the servers' software, network, and hardware infrastructure.

DevOps Engineer.

DevOps engineers look after the procedures, equipment, and methodologies required for the software deployment process. A DevOps engineer must be familiar with DevOps principles and approaches to streamline the development process. DevOps can also be not a separate role, but the joint work of a test automator and a developer.

Move from Manual to Automated Deployment

When you move to the cloud, hosting complexity increases and requires optimization. At this point, it’s a good idea to automate deployment. This way, you can save time on environment setup and manual testing to shorten lead times. It helps software engineers uncover errors more quickly and thoroughly, and with less code feedback.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/Continuous Deployment, or CI/CD, is one of the best ways to move from manual to automated deployment. CI/CD entails automated builds and tests to ship small, frequent updates. Where possible, CI/CD eliminates manual human interactions by automating everything and improving process visibility.

Find the Right Cloud Provider

Once you have decided in favor of application migration to the cloud, finding an appropriate cloud provider can be daunting. We suggest you choose based on three key factors:

  • Technical competencies.
  • Technology stack.
  • Architecture.

Numerous providers offer a wide variety of services in the market for cloud solutions. The most well-known names in the sector are those of the market leaders like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. However, some specialized cloud services are available via smaller providers.

The top three cloud service providers dominate the market. According to Statista, the breakdown as of the third quarter of 2022 is as follows:

  • Amazon Web Services (34%).
  • Azure by Microsoft (21%).
  • Google Cloud Platform (11%).

Finding the best cloud services and selecting a cloud platform can be simple. You can locate a cloud provider that meets a company's needs with the correct advice.

Determine the Realistic Costs and Timelines

After selecting the right supplier, the next thing to consider is to understand the associated expenditures, deadlines, and how well cloud migration fits into your financial plan. You must provide a framework to control the transactions and ensure predictable costs. The good thing is that every cloud provider offers migration planners that we highly recommend you use.

Using cloud migration planners, you may plan and monitor the costs and timelines of your migration to the cloud. Planners make it simple to set up, and you may alter each migration plan to meet your requirements. With a cloud migration plan, each migration's progress is automatically monitored, which makes it incredibly intuitive and manageable.

Choose Your Cloud Migration Strategy

Organizations should consider their needs and customer demands when deciding which cloud migration application technique to use. There are five common cloud migration strategies, also referred to as the "6th R".

Strategy 1: Rehost.

The migration strategy ofrehosting uses infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). The cloud server just receives a redeployment of your current data and programs. It is suitable for firms that are less accustomed to cloud systems because it is straightforward to execute. It is also an excellent choice if you want to move your applications without changing the code.

Strategy 2: Refactor.

Refactoring is the process of fine-tuning and cloud-optimizing your applications. In this instance, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) approach is applied. The programs' fundamental architecture isn't changed, but gets tweaked to make greater use of cloud-based technologies.

Strategy 3: Revise.

Revision expands on the other methods by requiring more significant changes to the design and code of the systems moving to the cloud. This may require making considerable code changes, but it is done to provide programs with the best opportunity to use cloud capabilities. This tactic necessitates considerable knowledge and advanced planning.

Strategy 4: Rebuild.

By replacing the current code base with a new one, rebuilding takes the Revise strategy a step further. This time-consuming approach is only taken into account when businesses realize that their current solutions need to satisfy their current company needs.

Strategy 5: Replace.

An alternative solution to the issues that inform the Rebuild plan is a replacement. In this instance, the corporation does not fully redo the creation of its native program. To do this, you must switch to a third-party, ready-made application. Only the data from your current application will be migrated; the rest of the system will be entirely new.

Strategy 6: Retire.

The Retire cloud migration strategy eliminates those parts of the application that cannot migrate to the cloud.

How Techstack Can Help with Cloud Migration

At Techstack, we monitor compliance with high standards of product development, and working in the cloud is a must-have for ensuring this quality. We will help you to move your product to the cloud, and we will be able to implement best practices and optimize work on products that are already in the cloud.

We have a robust portfolio of cloud and DevOps services, such as

Techstack Case: Creating a Cloud Infrastructure for a Video-Based Quality Control System.

We once had to install the necessary hardware and software and establish an AI-based computer vision system for remote real-time client monitoring. The next step was to test the fix and offer documentation for it.

We set up a computer vision system for real-time product manufacturing tracking and quality control. Through early defect identification, real-time line status updates, and production line photos provided to plant staff, this solution sought to reduce scrap on shingle production lines.

As a result, early product defect detection lowered waste and cut costs during manufacturing. Within a year, we went from having a small team to bringing an IoT hardware kit and software product to market. We have created innovative products that reduce annual spending on manufacturing upgrades by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Migrate to the Cloud Seamlessly with Techstack

Cloud migration can benefit your business, improving tech performance and enhancing security. Still, to do it right, you need to consider the challenges and pitfalls that can turn moving to the cloud into a costly and chaotic process. Choosing the most appropriate cloud migration strategy and the right cloud provider can help you run the migration process smoothly.

With a strong track record of building cloud infrastructure and platforms, Techstack can assist you in moving your product to the cloud, and we can also put best practices into place and speed up work already in the cloud.

Leverage our cloud migration expertise.