Summary: A nightmare public cloud migration can be a cause for sleepless nights for enterprise managers. No one wants to see everything collapse during the migration process, but it’s a reality that has severely impacted many companies.
When businesses undergo a nightmare migration, the results can be devastating:
- Angry customers unable to log into their accounts
- Compliance violations
- Lost archives and old data
- Introduced errors and configuration mistakes
Of course, the migration process is not always perfect, especially without a comprehensive plan and public cloud migration strategy. Having a pre-established strategy can alleviate stress and simplify post-migration cleanup for the team. Here are five key factors:
- Performance Planning
To improve performance, enterprises must understand their current performance. Start by establishing baseline performance metrics and identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) for workloads. This will help identify areas for improvement and properly scale the cloud deployment.
For example, assess current bottlenecks (such as storage and computing power). Consider how these bottlenecks affect workload performance and how they can be improved by providing resources in the cloud. After migration, performance data may change, but it is important to understand the current situation. During the migration process, this understanding will help optimize and provide quantitative improvements.
- Convert Workloads to Cloud-Native
An evolutionary mindset is crucial for successful cloud migration. Since migrations can take one to two years, technologies and requirements may change, and additional changes may be necessary. In some respects, the migration is never truly complete.
Think of migration as part of an ongoing evolution. Adopting a mindset of continuous improvement can help enterprises adapt to these changes and encourage their teams to embrace new concepts and services in the public cloud.
- Ensure Resilience
It is important to test systems during the migration and minimize downtime to levels acceptable for end users. While internal users of applications may be satisfied with temporary workarounds during downtime, enterprise customers will quickly abandon the service in favor of more resilient solutions from competitors.
Understanding how workloads are currently configured for high availability and resilience in case of failure is crucial. This knowledge won’t map directly to the cloud, and enterprises will need to update configurations to fully leverage possible improvements and close any gaps.
- Workload Selection
Workload selection mainly involves prioritizing and migrating the right workloads at the right time. In other words, which workloads should remain on-premise, which should be migrated first, and in what order should the migration occur? Enterprises need to answer these questions before starting the migration process.
While it may be tempting to move the most critical workloads first, this could be the most complex scenario with multiple confounding factors. Instead, choose simpler, less critical workloads for the first migration, and increase complexity in subsequent attempts.
- Pilot Migration
Running a small, quick migration as a test or pilot can help businesses identify successful strategies and methods. It is important to choose the right small projects for this initial migration phase. During this process, be sure to closely monitor the migration—services like AWS Migration Hub will help enterprises track the process.
A solid migration plan can significantly increase the chances of a smooth and successful transition to the cloud. If a company is developing a public cloud migration strategy and wants to avoid a migration nightmare, it must ensure it leverages these five key elements.