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Cloud Migration Checklist

Businesses often have difficulties with cloud migration. Recent studies indicate that 55% of cloud migrations experience substantial delays or costs more than anticipated.

Moreover, 62% of firms now shifting to the cloud regard the process as either challenging or unsuccessful. The majority of these firms hurry into the transformation without carefully evaluating:

Total ownership expenditures (TCO).

How the team will migrate vast quantities of data and mission-critical applications to the cloud.

Various deployment and integration alternatives for the cloud

Emerging cybersecurity threats.

How ready is the internal team to function in the cloud?

Before a team begins transferring applications and services to the cloud, TechLadder Cloud Migration experts advise following this cloud migration checklist to ensure a smooth migration process.

Choose a Dependable Migration Architect (s)

Cloud migration requires multiple technical choices and strategies; therefore, you must assign a single professional or a team of specialists to oversee the project. Whether you choose one or more staff members, a migration architect’s responsibility is to

  • Evaluate whether services are better suited to on-premises or cloud hosting.
  • Create a migration schedule and a cloud strategy blueprint.
  • Create effective solutions for relocating data and applications.
  • Identify and manage any required app refactoring.
  • Determine migration priority.
  • Define the necessary toolset.

 

The professional architect should also give a comprehensive view of your IT infrastructure. This procedure requires answering the following inquiries:

  • What applications do you provide, and who utilizes them (and how frequently)?
  • How crucial are the applications you want to relocate to your business?
  • What resources do programs use, and how dependent are they on other programs?
  • What SLAs, business continuity measures, and compliance procedures are in place currently?
  • Exist performance problems that impede existing operations?

Depending on the study, the migration architect should evaluate if your present staff has the requisite skills to:

  • Complete the migration.
  • Utilize a cloud-based infrastructure.

 

Never transfer to the cloud until you are certain that your staff will flourish in the new environment.

To demonstrate the ROI of cloud migration, the specialized migration team should additionally calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO). The TCO evaluation for cloud migration consists of elements such as:

  • The cost of migration as a whole.
  • Cloud charges following migration (primarily the price of bandwidth and networking).
  • The expense of training workers.
  • Regular post-migration maintenance.
  • The potential cost of downtime.
  • Space, cooling, and energy expenditures (for an on-prem private cloud).

Define Objectives and Key Performance Indicators for Migration.

Next, determine the major purpose of the migration (s).
  • Modernizing a legacy application is a frequent high-level objective.
  • Accelerating a certain service.
  • Enhanced operational capabilities.
  • Strengthening system resilience.
  • Increasing consumer satisfaction.
  • Obtaining increased service scalability.
  • lowering operating expenses.
  • Enhanced data security.

In addition to the overall objective, the team should develop key performance indicators for cloud migration (KPIs). Using these metrics, the performance of a migrated application or service will be compared to its expected performance. Your team may measure an unlimited amount of KPIs, but each statistic falls into one of two categories:
  • During the migration process, you adhere to a set of KPIs.
  • After-migration KPIs

The following are the most frequent KPIs that a firm might monitor throughout the migration process:
  • Timeframe of the migration (both as a whole and per app).
  • Critical services are accessible.
  • Duration of service and data center outages.
  • Degraded service caused by downtime.
  • The number of service tickets created.
  • Migration costs.

Let’s examine some post-migration KPIs your team may monitor:

  • Infrastructure KPIs (CPU usage, service memory footprint, disk performance, load balancing, latency, network throughput, etc.).
  • App performance metrics (error rates, timeouts, the average response time (ART), the peak response time (PRT), uptime, availability, etc.)
  • User experience KPIs (number of request spikes, HTTP status code errors, thrown and logged exceptions, lag, response times, etc.).
  • Metrics for business effect (duration of the check-out process, subscribe and unsubscribe rates, engagement rates, etc.).
  • Key performance indicators for costs (monthly billing, staffing costs, third-party tools, consulting costs, etc.).

Before determining which KPIs to follow, you must establish a baseline value for each metric. Baselining is the process of evaluating the present (pre-migration) status of a mobile application and service. These KPIs allow you to decide whether or not performance post-migration is acceptable.

Perform Data and Application Analysis

The evaluation of data is a crucial component of our cloud migration checklist, given that migrating data is generally the most challenging aspect of using the cloud. Careful evaluation of data enables your team to evaluate:

  • Data risk tiers.
  • The quantity and kind of data that you want to move.
  • Overall data resiliency.
  • Legal data privacy standards (if any).
  • The most serious challenges to data integrity
  • Possible situations of data breach or leaking after relocation.

The location of your data may affect the functionality of an application and service. Moving data to the cloud while data-access mechanisms continue to function on-premises may have a substantial impact on performance. The same holds true if the database remains on-premises but the service that accesses it is located in the cloud.

In addition to assessing data, your on-premises applications should also be evaluated. Before moving, the team must compile a list of all on-premises applications and their servers. In addition, you must evaluate any existing virtual machines and account for future application dependencies.

As a consequence, you may evaluate which applications need restructuring prior to their cloud migration. The team may also begin to prioritize which applications will be migrated first.

Analyze Migration Options to the Cloud

Next on the cloud migration checklist is determining which applications need which sort of cloud integration. There are two options:

  • Lift-and-shift integration, or shallow cloud integration: When you lift and shift an application, you make little to no modifications to its code and deploy it to the cloud in essentially its existing state. Rehosting is the process of transferring an app to the cloud without making any modifications, while refactoring is the process of making small changes to an app during cloud migration.
  • Intensive cloud integration: In contrast to shallow cloud integration, deep cloud integration necessitates app modifications to take use of cloud functionalities. Modifications might vary from relatively basic tweaks (such as configuring auto-scaling and dynamic load balancing) to extensive upgrades (such as allowing serverless computing) that transform the application into a cloud-native solution.

Compared to reworking substantial chunks of an application, shallow cloud integration is a substantially quicker solution. In general, mission-critical applications justify the effort of extensive integrations. After migrating to the cloud, you may restructure less critical applications and services over time, allowing them to use the shallow approach.

When evaluating which service needs which form of integration, businesses often choose to retire or keep applications.

  • Retiring is the process of recognizing a defunct program or service that has no value if uploaded to the cloud.
  • Retaining is the choice to maintain an application on-premises, generally for security or regulatory reasons.

Select an Appropriate Cloud Deployment Model

Selecting an appropriate cloud deployment strategy is essential for successful cloud migration. Five models are available, each of which is suited to a certain use case:

  • Public cloud (a multi-tenant environment that provides access to compute resources over the Internet or through a dedicated direct connection).
  • Private cloud (a single-tenant system in which an enterprise runs cloud resources within its own data center).
  • Hybrid cloud (a mix of on-prem systems, public, and private clouds in which workloads move between environments via automation and orchestration).
  • Multi-cloud (a combination of two or more public cloud IaaS systems) (a mix of two or more public cloud IaaS environments).
  • Community Cloud (infrastructure shared between several companies with shared needs or concerns).

The deployment methodology you should choose mostly relies on your organization’s specific demands and objectives. Here are a few suggestions:

  • The public cloud offers a scalable, pay-per-use environment. The public cloud may not be suited for sensitive applications, despite its scalability.
  • A corporation having the financial resources to operate an on-premises cloud environment suited to its mission-critical workloads should use a private cloud.
  • A hybrid cloud allows you to execute sensitive workloads on-premises while using the scalability of the public cloud during demand surges.
  • Before creating a hybrid architecture, you must be aware of the hybrid cloud’s problems, which, when properly addressed, are immensely advantageous.
  • Multi-cloud is a great option for businesses concerned with vendor lock-in or those seeking to combine services from several providers.

Choose a provider of cloud computing services.

Unless you choose to deploy a private cloud on-premises, the next step on your cloud migration checklist should be to identify a cloud provider. Despite the fact that the majority of providers offer comparable services, they are not identical. Important factors to consider while selecting a cloud service include:
  • Selection of services
  • Availability in certain areas
  • Uptime assurances.
  • The familiarity of your internal team with the vendor’s technology stack.
  • Compliance standards unique to a certain industry (e.g., keeping user data in the location of origin according to CCPA or GDPR).
  • Managed IT services and post-migration support.

Keep in mind that the most well-known service providers are not necessarily the most suitable. Not every prominent vendor is a suitable fit for a business in a given industry since they attempt to satisfy a wide range of demands. For instance, a firm that specializes in the healthcare industry may benefit from forming a partnership with a specialized service provider that understands and supports HIPAA compliance better.

Implement Essential Refactoring

Before migrating applications and services to the cloud, your team should begin making the required adjustments to apps and services after you have determined the kind of cloud deployment you want and which partners you will work with.

The objective is to maximize the software’s effectiveness and efficiency in the cloud. Your team may, for instance, restructure an application to:

  • Utilize a variable number of operating instances to provide near-instant scalability.
  • Take use of cloud capabilities that are dynamic (such as the ability to allocate and de-allocate resources per current needs).
  • Create a service-oriented architecture to swiftly transfer individual cloud services (both this time and down the line).

Governance and security should also be reconsidered now. You will likely need to modify your governance approach to depend less on internal security and control and more on the cloud services provided by the service provider.

  • Assess if the migration might result in the introduction of new vulnerabilities.
  • Determine how your internal team will collaborate with the cloud service provider to ensure the safety of your cloud assets.
  • Modify (and maybe enhance) your present security policies and methods.
  • Consider if you can benefit from the extra security tools provided by the supplier.
  • Establish failover and disaster recovery systems.

Methodically Migrate and Switch Off-Premise Operations Traffic

While it is possible to transfer everything to the cloud simultaneously, this strategy might be complex and dangerous to implement. Instead, you should migrate applications and services one by one, beginning with less important programs and working your way up to the most important ones. This strategy for migration should look like this:
  • Prioritize applications that can be migrated with the least impact on operations. Apps requiring merely rehosting or using minimum resources are excellent alternatives (such as low storage or computations).
  • Then, begin migrating applications with high business value and minimal migration risk.
  • Leave the mission-critical and disruptive workloads until the final phases of the migration. Never begin relocating these applications until the ones from the previous stages are operating properly.
  • Use either a human or automated test (or both) to determine whether or not the migration was successful.

You may move traffic from an on-premises solution to the cloud in two methods, depending on the architecture of your applications and data stores:
  • All at Once: As soon as the application is operating on the cloud, the team redirects all on-premises traffic.
  • A little bit at a time: Once the team has built up the cloud-based application, a few clients are transferred to the new environment. If everything goes as predicted, you will continue migrating clients to the cloud until all end-users depend on the new application.

Utilize the Cloud Migration Services of TechLadder and Migrate Confidently

While switching to the cloud is often a no-brainer, many firms struggle or have limited success when migrating their applications to the cloud. Adhering to the aforementioned TechLadder cloud migration checklist guarantees that you avoid all frequent hazards, allowing you to plan your cloud adoption without the risk of incurring expensive errors. For further Guidance or support with your cloud transition, visit TechLadder Cloud Engineering Services or Contact TechLadder Cloud Migration experts directly.

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