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Know All Important Stages of Cloud Migration
Written By
Himanshu Goyal
Updated On
May 24, 2024
Read time 5 minutes
Cloud Computing has become a popular trend in the IT industry, as it helps businesses run applications and store data without deploying and maintaining on-premises IT infrastructure. What’s more interesting is that companies can migrate their existing applications and data to cloud platforms. But, cloud migration is not an easy process to execute. It requires proper planning and analysis, trained staff members, and much more.
While migrating to the cloud, it is crucial for businesses to determine and understand the essential phases of cloud migration. In this article, we will discuss the critical stages of cloud migration.
At first, it is important to have a proper plan in mind. It involves developing a business case that addresses why you need to migrate to the cloud. Consider the present scenario and possible advantages that you will get after migrating to the cloud. Also, it is required to assess the computing resources before migration.
The right approach for planning cloud migration is to assign specific roles to your team members so that things can be executed quickly. However, if you have a large project, then you need to have a specialist in charge.
There are three types of cloud platforms – private, public, and hybrid. You can choose the one that fits your requirements. Also, you will have to make a choice between a single cloud environment and the multi-cloud environment.
In a single cloud environment, a single cloud provider provides all the services and applications that an organization needs. In a multi-cloud environment, you can use various cloud services from different providers. The benefit of using a multi-cloud environment is that you can use different clouds for various tasks to get the best results while reducing the vendor lock-in. Also, with a multi-cloud environment, you can minimize the dependence on any one provider by lowering costs and increasing flexibility.
The process of analyzing the pre-migration performance of your application to ascertain the post-migration performance is known as baselining. It gives you the report of migration and validates post-migration performance. So, you need to establish a baseline metric for every key performance indicator that you want to measure. To do so, verify how much data you need to collect for determining the baseline and choose a short baseline period to move faster. Well, whatever data-collection model is right for your industry, be sure about the type of data that you’re going to collect and for what period of time.
You need to finalize whether you want to migrate the entire application to the cloud at once or do it in intervals. For instance, you can choose to move the whole application data at once or do it component by component.
If you want to perform component by component, then you need to identify the connections between your services and which services depend on what other services. In case, if you want to start with service by service migration that has fewer dependencies, then choose to migrate the most internal services, and then follow up with your other services.
Generally, most organizations prefer to use native approaches for cloud migration. For example, if you are willing to migrate IMAP to Office 365 or Exchange, then you can use Exchange PowerShell cmdlets that allow you to migrate IMAP emails to Office 365.
But there are various limitations with native approaches, such as you cannot migrate entire data at once, it doesn’t support migration from every email server, etc. Thus, it is recommended to have third-party software in hand to make the migration process easier. For instance, if you want to migrate to Office 365/Exchange, then prefer using Kernel Office 365 Migration tool.
If you plan the migration carefully, everything will go smoothly and quickly. Also, depending upon the size of your databases and applications, you can use various techniques to copy the databases. If you don’t have much data for migration, then you can copy the data with an internet connection only. However, for a large amount of data, it is recommended to avoid unnecessary data before sending it to the cloud. And if you want to reduce costs of migration, then prefer shipping the physical drives of data to your cloud provider.
Make sure you take proper security measurements while performing the migration. Even the temporary data storage should be as secure as the destination. If you are hiring a cloud provider, then you will get access to various migration tools, use them to ease your migration process.
Even after migrating to the cloud, there are a few things that you need to consider. First of all, make sure you have a backup plan and solution in hand. Moving to the cloud is secure, but a disaster can happen anytime. So, it’s always great to have a backup of your data.
To backup your data, you can ask your cloud provider to provide some backup solutions, or you can use third-party software as well. For example, if you want to backup Office 365 mailboxes, then you can opt for Kernel Office 365 Backup & Restore tool.
Migration to the cloud becomes easier if you have proper planning and a knowledgeable team of experts who can execute the tasks efficiently. But, even after having a plan, it’s not that easy to perform the migration. Various stages are involved in a successful migration to the cloud. In this article, we covered the critical stages of cloud migration that can help you make your migration process easier.
