Application Cloud Migration With Data Protection

Anticipate And Plan For Complexities

Accelerating application migration to the cloud while considering data and security issues isn’t a simple process. You need to be aware that you can encounter challenges at any point. The best practice is to create a plan for anticipated challenges and how to overcome them. This way, you can quickly respond to potential difficulties as they come.

• Prepare People And Processes: Establishing a clear plan with ownership and requirements for each stakeholder is vital. The entire team, including networking, security, applications, and IT, needs to collaborate effectively. This lays down responsibilities for dealing with challenges and how to escalate the same for a quick resolution.
• Create A Landing Zone For Your Applications: To protect your data, you want to ensure that it is moving to a pre-established zone. These landing zones should have all the requirements such as compliance, security, access control, and networking in place before moving the data.
• Plan For Application Management During And After Migration: When designing landing zones, you need to plan how you’ll manage the applications. Most cloud migration tools have application management capability features you can rely on.

Adopt An Iterative Approach

When most people think about moving to the cloud, they often see it as a single and uniform process. But that’s just a misconception. Migration to the cloud is a series of processes broken down into mini-migrations that must move in a coordinated way. Here’s the best way to go about it:

Migrate Workloads In Bits

To successfully move your applications to the cloud securely, consider taking an iterative approach. Moving applications in bits enables you to test the foundation of your landing zone to ensure its capability to handle your workload. It also helps you identify gaps and work on them before moving another bit.

Consider Application Dependencies

Look at the applications that need to be together to work and group them during assessment and cloud migration. This way, you can test them and confirm that they’re performing as they should, to enable you to undertake the final migration process.

Explore Free Migration tools

Migration tools help you simplify the migration process and move your applications securely to the cloud. Using free tools can help you achieve this goal while helping you save resources that may be used in other areas of your business.

Take A Workload-Specific Approach

Applications are not made equal, and they won’t all work with the standard lift-and-shift method. Therefore, this is a huge consideration if you need to move all your applications to the cloud successfully. The strategy you choose to accelerate your application and protect data should match your needs, workload, and migration capabilities.

Here are the types of cloud migration strategies (3):

• Re-Hosting or Lift-and-Shift: This is simply taking your applications from on-premise devices and machines and hosting them in the cloud.
• Re-Platforming: This is optimized re-hosting. It involves optimizing applications to fit into the new infrastructure.
• Re-Purchasing: You stop using your old applications by moving them to a cloud-based environment.
• Re-Factoring: This is when you can’t scale up using your existing infrastructure. You re-architect it to make it capable and to improve the performance of your applications.
• Retire: This requires turning off some elements that are no longer in use.
• Retain: Just in case there are some applications you’re not ready to migrate because of one issue or another, you can keep them as they are and re-visit them when you’re ready.

Conclusion

Are you planning to migrate applications to the cloud? Whichever method you plan to go about, keep these practices in mind; thoroughly assess your source environment, find the right partners, plan for complexities, and adopt an iterative cloud migration approach.