By now, most small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) have adopted a cloud-based strategy. Whether this strategy incorporates migrating legacy internal applications to a SaaS-based offering or porting existing front-end client applications to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud service offered by Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or IBM, SMBs have sufficient challenges living a public cloud solution.
Hypershift, a managed security service provider (MSSP), understands the financial, operational, and technical challenges SMBs face when
adopting a private or public cloud migration strategy. This article offers SMBs valuable guidelines for cloud migration based on Hypershift's experience and expertise, which has a proven track record in successful migrations.
What is a Cloud Migration Strategy & Why is it Important?
A faulty migration to any cloud solution can be expensive, time-consuming, and harmful to the organization and its customers. A well-executed migration can help organizations increase their revenues and lower operating costs while future-proofing additional products and services to increase their market share.
The difference between a faulty and well-executed cloud migration starts with a proper, successful transition into a cloud migration journey.
Here are the steps each SMB needs to embrace a successful cloud migration strategy:
- Have an apparent reason your organization wants to migrate to cloud-based services.
- What are the expected cost optimization and savings from moving from a premises infrastructure to a cloud solution?
- Do you have experienced resources that have cloud engineering, security, and operations expertise in cloud capabilities?
Addressing these concerns is essential to creating an effective cloud migration plan. While these concerns seem simplistic, several well-regarded organizations suffered significant setbacks because of a faulty cloud modernization project.
Healthcare.gov: The Affordable Care Act website launch was seen as a failure. The $630 million website needed help with its multi-cloud approach. Users faced difficulties buying healthcare coverage and experienced glitches in federal subsidy calculations. “In California, some users waited up to four hours in a virtual queue to create an account, only to find the sign-up process unavailable.”
Knight Capital: "Based on an incorrect algorithm, Knight Capital's cloud-based automatic stock-trading software resulted in a $440 million loss for the firm in just forty-five minutes. The software bought stocks at the market price, creating unwanted positions worth several billion dollars before selling at a lower bid price."
Failing to address "Why do we need to move to the cloud?" and "If we have experienced engineers" leads to setbacks similar to those in these case studies.
Top 4 Cloud Strategies Supporting a Seamless Migration Experience
SMBs have many cloud-based tools and options when considering what type of migration strategy aligns with their business requirement. Once the SMB addresses the initial three concerns above, the next step is determining which migration strategy to execute.
Use Case 1: Organizations wishing to port existing in-house on-premise applications into an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering will consider rehosting migration.
If the organization wants to move an existing application into an IaaS offering to leverage better cloud-based computing, storage, and elasticity, the rehosting strategy is the preferred option. The rehosting migration strategy ports the application into the cloud infrastructure with little or no changes.
Use Case 2: Organizations wanting to leverage cloud-based VMs for legacy applications will use the reploying strategy.
If the organization wants to move an existing application on-premise physical servers into a virtualized platform hosted in the cloud, the redeploying migration strategy would be the optimal choice. Organizations wishing to increase compute, memory, and cloud storage capabilities leverage a virtualized machine environment inside a cloud-based solution. Rehosting gives the users a scalable solution to help improve these resources with no application changes.
Use Case 3: Creating a brand new application based on cloud standards.
Suppose the organization has determined a current application will not successfully port into a cloud environment with potential vulnerabilities added. In that case, they may develop a new application based on cloud-based standards. Refactoring is common for legacy applications living on current IT infrastructure that no longer receive updates from the original developers, and most of its features meet the business requirements.
Use Case 4: Organizations looking to keep a legacy application for compliance will leverage the retaining cloud migration strategy.
If the organization has completed a refactoring cloud migration strategy by placing a newly developed application into a cloud management platform, keeping becomes an important complementary migration strategy. This strategy aligns with SMBs' need to retain a legacy application operational within the original environment for several years to meet regulatory compliance mandates and reduce potential downtimes.
Taking the First Step in Cloud Migration
After the SMB has addressed immediate concerns surrounding why it's moving to the cloud and which migration method it is leading towards, the most critical next step is to evaluate possible MSSPs for assisting in planning and execution. MSSPs like Hypershift bring years of experience helping clients with virtually every cloud migration method.
From rehosting to retaining existing applications, Hypershift cloud consultants help their clients with every phase of the migration process. If the organization needs access to experienced security, cloud, and data engineers, Hypershift has access to engineers with the required expertise to assist.
Another critical component of the cloud migration experience is post-migration monitoring, reporting, and operations. SMBs often need more IT staff with minimal post-migration experience. Hypershift's MSSP offerings include a 24x7x365 monitoring service to help augment their clients' needs.
Where to start? Contact Hypershift to discuss your cloud migration project!
