AWS Cloud Migration: Migration Assessment, Strategizing & Best Practices

According to TechJury, a ratio of 16 out of 20 businesses shifted to a cloud-based infrastructure in 2020. This ratio is only going to continue to increase exponentially as more and more companies take advantage of cloud migration rather than remaining with traditional on-premises infrastructures.

AWS offers a huge upside with negligible disadvantages to all sizes of businesses who consider cloud migration. Undoubtedly, it is far better than any on-premise system if we consider performance, flexibility, and scalability factors. There is a reason the platform has retained a strong 30% average of the market as the preferred cloud platform provider in the last 4 consecutive years.

Before we move onto our major pros and cons of migrating to AWS, let’s first review the tools, strategies, and best practices for moving onto cloud infrastructure.

Assessment Tools for AWS Migration

The first critical step of any cloud migration is to perform an assessment to analyze the gaps before moving to cloud infrastructure. If you are considering moving your business onto AWS, then there are a set of tools that you can leverage to assess your company’s cloud readiness before migration.

AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART) is the most popular of all the potential assessment tools available as it provides a complete solution for assessing all corners of your infrastructure. 

AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART)

AWS offers the Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool to figure out a variety of factors before scheduling cloud migration. This tool supports decision makers to find out whether your operations, business, and workloads are ready for migration.

The tool also ensures that all your processes align with security protocols to migrate onto the cloud safely. There are a series of questions included in this assessment, and the examination provides an excellent report that appraises each critical area of your organization, and delivers a roadmap of recommendations on how to improve.

AWS Cloud Migration Strategy

Moving on-premise systems to the cloud can be complex. So, it is essential to create a structure and outline strategies to ensure smooth shifting of workloads. 

To simply structure the necessary strategies, we can divide the migration process into four steps:

• Planning Migration: Outlining a migration plan will allow you to make calculations by assessing your current and future business requirements. Also, migration reasons can play a huge role in planning strategies for your migration.
• Opting Cloud Environment: There are various cloud models available to optimize, such as public cloud, hybrid cloud, private cloud, or multi-cloud. Similarly, there are a variety of providers as well where the leading one is AWS. Choosing an optimal provider and the right cloud model also depends on your requirements.
• Migrating Apps & Data: If all planning is successful, then it’s to carry out the execution by slowly shifting your workload to cloud infrastructure. There are separate strategies for wisely shifting workload without interrupting your operations.
• Validating Successful Migration: After proper migration and implementation, it’s important to test your cloud environment to ensure a successful migration. It is important to check performance and other relevant factors to conclude a complete migration.

AWS 6 R’s — Migration Strategies

Amazon AWS also provides 6 application migration strategies in a white paper. AWS calls it the 6 R’s of migration. Each of these strategies can be effective in varying situations. Some of these strategies focus on large-scale application migration, while other strategies are useful for medium to small-scale migration. Here are our 6 R’s:

1. Re-host (Referred to as a “lift and shift”)
2. Re-platform (Referred to as “lift, tinker, and shift”)
3. Re-factor / Re-architect
4. Re-purchase
5. Retire
6. Retain (Referred to as re-visit)

AWS Best Migration Practices

A successful migration process takes a lot of planning. One incorrect move can easily mess up the functionality of a whole cloud infrastructure. That’s why following AWS’s Best Migration practices to smoothly handle the whole process will ensure success. Here are a few important practices:

1. Clear Vision for IT & Business Processes

Many IT and business processes will overlap along the process, so it’s worth approaching this shift with a broader clear vision to manage overlapping processes without any problem.

2. Consider Careful Change Management

Migrating to cloud infrastructure is a complex process, and the whole move might be new for your staff. Support your team with appropriate training before they are ready to manage all the operations before and after the migration. Make your change management and training a priority.

3. Assess your IT Processes

Businesses should be aware of all their IT processes that they are going to migrate onto the cloud. This assessment is very important to quantify and measure cloud adoption success. 

4. Choose the Right Partners

Identifying a migration partner who holds the necessary technical expertise for AWS migration can be a key support system and facilitate you in your operational model plan.

5. Leverage Fully Managed Services

AWS offers various managed services, including Amazon RDS, AWS Directory Service, and Amazon DynamoDB, which you can use to free up time to work on revenue-generating features instead.

6. Monitor Everything

After a successful migration, the next important step is to monitor everything that happens inside your cloud infrastructure. Gather all possible insights about the newly implemented infrastructure to create feedback loops and find more room for improvement.

The Advantages of AWS Cloud Migration 

Leveraging cloud infrastructure possesses many benefits over an on-premise traditional system. Here are a few of the most significant perks that businesses experience after cloud migration:

1. Increased Efficiency

According to Trackvia’s stats, businesses increased their productivity by 40% after making a shift to the cloud. This instant increase is due to less friction between cloud operations than on-premises hardware experience. Also, moving to the cloud makes it easier to manage and track all AWS resources that further adds up to overall efficiency.

2. Highest Performance

Nothing can beat AWS when it comes to performance metrics as the platform offers a 5 9s (99.999%) level of reliability. In addition, AWS offers excellent computing power to fulfill all business requirements without facing any downtime. The performance ratio stays equal for small to large-scale enterprises that migrate from their on-premise systems to the cloud.

3. Scalability

Scalability is probably one of the biggest perks of AWS. Companies pay as their requirements scale up. Also, you can automatically manage scalability depending on your application requirements. 

4. Highest Security

AWS never compromises on the security of their cloud servers. The platform uses a strategic security process that consists of four steps outlined as prevention, detection, response, and remediation. Also, companies can utilize third-party tools to further increase the security of their cloud-hosted applications. 

5. Agility & Elasticity

Using AWS cloud computing, you will be able to make the best use of your IT resources. Therefore, it is unnecessary to overprovision resources. Instead, you can take advantage of the IT capabilities and resources your business actually requires. The major perk is that you are able to adjust resources in such a way that your business needs are efficiently met. 

Bottom Line

To be successful, take a slow, strategic and steady process to cloud migration and empower relevant parties to play their role in the outcome. AWS is unmatchable if we compare any other provider on a performance basis. Collectively, the efficiency, performance, scalability, flexibility, and security factors make a migration to AWS a hugely beneficial decision however complex the process will be in its implementation. 

Caylent provides a critical DevOps-as-a-Service function to high growth companies looking for expert support with Kubernetes, cloud security, cloud infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines. Our managed and consulting services are a more cost-effective option than hiring in-house, and we scale as your team and company grow. Check out some of the use cases, learn how we work with clients, and read more about our DevOps-as-a-Service offering.