Businesses of all sizes are benefiting from migrating their infrastructure to the cloud. Cloud migrations offer scalability and performance improvements that aren’t possible with on-premise solutions.
Beyond that, cloud migration can substantially lower IT management costs while improving agility, which every business needs in today’s fast-moving marketplace.
Knowing these benefits, companies still postpone their cloud migration due to the perceived difficulty or the possible disruption a migration may pose to business operations. However, by using the right strategy and implementing the right cloud migration tools, your migrations to the cloud can be a seamless transition with no downtime or loss of performance.
To help your business prepare for a successful cloud migration, we’ll go over the top migration tools and explain what scenarios they perform best in. Armed with this information, your organization can quickly leverage cloud technology without disrupting business, applications, or data.
Best Cloud Migration Tools: What to Know Before Deciding
Cloud migration tools can be divided into two main categories: native migration tools and third-party tools. Each has pros and cons, which we’ll cover below.
Native Migration Tools
These are tools specifically designed by the cloud platform you are migrating to, such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS). They have specialized features to work with the data, users, and apps specific to their platform.
These tools are often the top choice for businesses due to their comprehensive feature set, support, and security.
Third-Party Migration & Monitoring Tools
These types of agnostic tools work with virtually all of the popular cloud platforms and can offer more flexibility in some instances.
Third-party tools can also introduce complications because they may lack support for certain cloud platform features or data formatting. They are generally used in more niche cases or for different forms of cloud monitoring not offered by native tools.
If you’re unsure which tool is best for your migration, Hypershift Technology can help. Our engineers can analyze your current infrastructure and provide the optimum platform and migration tool to best suit your organization’s goals.
Our Favorite Tools
To give you some examples, let's go over our favorite cloud migration tools and provide some insight into their use cases.
Azure Migrate | Native
With a proven enterprise history and reputation, Azure Migrate offers key functions for businesses migrating to the Azure cloud platform. Beyond migration assistance, Azure Migrate can analyze your current technology stack and provide a detailed roadmap for optimizing the migration.
Azure Migrate works with an array of migration scenarios and offers robust tools for monitoring performance at every step to ensure a seamless transition for your users. For example, Azure Migrate, Azure Site Recovery, and Azure Database Migration Service can all be used to assess, replicate, and migrate workloads, applications, and databases from on-premises environments to a variety of destinations, including other cloud platforms, co-location facilities, or different on-premises data centers.
Azure Migrate's tight coupling with Azure DevOps services allows for streamlined DevOps automation and toolchain integration when migrating to Azure. While it can potentially facilitate migrations to other cloud platforms besides Azure, its focus and optimization are for seamless integration within the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. Leveraging Azure Migrate for migrations to other clouds like AWS or Google Cloud may require additional custom work.
Google Cloud Migration Tools | Native
For businesses migrating workloads to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google provides a comprehensive set of native migration tools based around its Cloud Migration Center. This centralized interface acts as a command center, allowing you to access various tailored modules to plan and execute your specific migration process.
Google Cloud's migration tools can handle complex migration scenarios involving legacy systems, hybrid environments, and multi-cloud architectures. Whether you're migrating from on-premises data centers, other public clouds, or a mix of platforms, these tools are designed to seamlessly transition your applications, data, and infrastructure to GCP.
Unlike the Amazon migration tools, which are primarily focused on migrations to AWS, Google Cloud Migrate tools provide more flexibility to migrate to and from multiple cloud platforms, including AWS and Azure. That being said, if your organization is planning a migration to Google Cloud Platform, leveraging Google's native migration tools through the Cloud Migration Center is the obvious choice.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration Services | Native
When it comes to migrating applications and workloads to the AWS Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a comprehensive suite of native migration tools and services. The AWS Migration Services are designed to streamline and simplify the migration process, ensuring minimal downtime and seamless transitions.
One of the key strengths of AWS Migration Services is their built-in capabilities for optimizing workloads during the migration process. These tools leverage AWS's extensive cloud expertise to analyze your existing infrastructure, identify opportunities for rightsizing resources, and implement best practices for performance, security, and cost optimization on AWS.
AWS Migration Services also excel in facilitating migrations from a wide range of sources, including on-premises data centers, other public clouds, and hybrid environments. With support for over 200 cloud platforms, these tools can accommodate migrations from various starting points, ensuring a smooth transition to AWS, regardless of your current infrastructure landscape.
While the Amazon migration tools are optimized for and primarily used to migrate workloads to AWS, they are not strictly limited to only supporting migrations to the AWS Cloud environment. In fact, the tools are flexible enough to facilitate migrations from a wide range of source platforms, even if the target destination is typically AWS.
Quest On-Demand | Third-Party
On Demand Migration is a feature-rich and comprehensive tool from Quest Software designed to streamline the process of consolidating and migrating Microsoft 365 environments. It supports the full breadth of Microsoft 365 workloads, enabling the migration of Exchange mailboxes, OneDrive file shares, SharePoint site collections, Teams data, and even on-premises Active Directory and Entra identities.
Under the hood, On Demand Migration offers advanced mapping and automation features to streamline the migration. It can intelligently align users, groups, permissions, and other Microsoft 365 objects between the source and target tenants, reducing the manual effort required. The tool's automation capabilities further accelerate the migration timeline by handling many tasks autonomously.
On Demand Migration supports migrations between Microsoft 365 tenants, as well as from Microsoft 365 to other cloud platforms like Google Workspace and Amazon WorkMail.
Cirrus Migrate Cloud | Third-Party
Cirrus Migrate Cloud is a cloud-native, as-a-service solution that simplifies data migration across various block storage environments, including on-premises and multi-cloud setups. It offers advanced automation capabilities to streamline data mobility and enhance visibility across storage environments and is made for enterprises and organizations that need to migrate data across a variety of on-premises and cloud-based storage environments.
A core feature of Cirrus Migrate Cloud is the ability to move your data seamlessly between different cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as between cloud and on-premises storage setups. The platform's multi-cloud compatibility ensures that you can adapt your data storage and migration approach to match your evolving requirements without being locked into a specific cloud vendor or on-premises infrastructure.
Nuntanix | Third-Party
Nutanix developed hyper-converged infrastructure to merge computing, storage, and networking into a single data center platform. They are expanding this concept to include on-premises, cloud, and edge computing, creating a hybrid multi-cloud platform.
- Nutanix Cloud Platform combines infrastructure and management in one place, offering a unified and secure platform for running data and applications at any scale across multiple clouds. It replaces traditional SAN environments and allows you to build a hybrid multi-cloud tailored to your needs.
- Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a vital part of Nutanix Cloud Platform, offering essential software-defined data services, security, recovery, and virtualization/cloud-native capabilities for your hybrid cloud setup.
- Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) allows you to easily extend on-premises environments to AWS and Azure clouds without expensive application refactoring.
- Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is a hybrid cloud solution that helps manage operations, data, security, self-service, planning, chargeback, and governance across clouds.
- Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) offers data services and security for structured and unstructured data on the Nutanix Cloud Platform.
Nutanix offers a platform for building a true hybrid multi-cloud, combining public clouds' simplicity, flexibility, and agility with the security and control of on-premises infrastructure. This platform provides capabilities for extending workloads to public clouds, enabling operators to burst or migrate applications across clouds without significant changes in each environment.
Pure Storage | Third-Party
Pure Storage is a company that specializes in high-speed data storage solutions for businesses. The top reasons clients should move to Pure Storage for cloud migration and hybrid cloud support: Pure Storage has led the field with vision, execution, and the industry's best purpose-built, all-flash array.
- Pure Storage has designed FlashArray™ systems to be Evergreen®, ensuring that migrations to Pure Storage will be the final. The FlashArray platform allows for non-disruptive upgrades of any part of the array without downtime or performance issues, eliminating the need to repurchase capacity or migrate data.
- Pure Storage's FlashArray and Pure Cloud Block Store allow for seamless data replication from on-premises devices to the cloud, retaining all features in the process.
- FlashArray//X and FlashArray//C offer an average total efficiency of more than 10:1 across all devices that have been deployed.
Are You Ready to Migrate?
By migrating services to the cloud, businesses can improve efficiency, performance, and scalability. However, every business is unique, and there are a few key questions to keep in mind before migrating.
- Which cloud platform matches my data and application needs the best?
- Will any services remain on-premise?
- What other technologies need to be integrated with the cloud platform you chose?
- Do you need offline, online, or hybrid migration?
- Are there any special compliance issues, such as security?
At Hypershift Technology, we can eliminate the guesswork in cloud migration planning and execution. Our engineers have experience working with Azure, AWS, GCP, and other platforms to determine the perfect fit for your data and applications.
Our DevOps consulting services can help you modernize your delivery processes and provide robust CI/CD pipelines to provide the ultimate performance for your users.
Contact Hypershift Technology to learn more about our DevOps and cloud migration services, which are designed to help you leverage the latest cloud technology to reduce costs, improve scalability, and optimize performance.
FAQ: Cloud Migration Tools
What Are Cloud Migration Tools?
Cloud migration tools are software applications that help automate and facilitate the transfer of data, apps, and resources from on-premise servers to the cloud. They can also be used to move from one cloud platform to another. Most cloud platforms, like AWS or Microsoft Azure, provide their own migration tools specifically designed for migrating to their platform. Other third-party migration tools can also be used in conjunction with native tools for enhanced monitoring.
What Is The Best Cloud Migration Tool?
Google Cloud Migration Tools, Azure Migrate, and AWS Migration Services are all highly rated and popular options for migrating to the cloud. The best cloud migration tool is the one designed for your specific infrastructure and the platform you are moving to. Different migrations will have different priorities. For example, one migration may prioritize application replatforming over other features.
What is Google Cloud Platform?
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a mix of cloud computing services for delivering apps, data, video, or other resources. It also has a suite of machine learning and AI tools that developers can use to extend the functions of their apps and products. GCP is the third largest cloud platform behind AWS (1) and Microsoft Azure (2).
What Is A Pre-Migration Assessment
A pre-migration assessment is completed using native or third-party tools to analyze your current IT infrastructure. The pre-migration assessment determines the best way to conduct the migration and spot any areas of potential trouble that could cause delays, data integrity issues, or performance bottlenecks. This type of evaluation is critical for successful cloud migration, and special care should be taken during this stage to minimize downtime or disruptions for your users.
