How to Implement Cloud Migration Automation

Cloud adoption is now increasing day by day. 30% of all IT budgets are allocated to adopting cloud computing services. To ensure the cost-effectiveness of such budget allocation, maximize your cloud migration processes through automation. Automating cloud migrations creates reliable, repeatable results across multiple environments to accelerate and simplify the entire migration process. 

Achieve cloud migration automation through a variety of tools to help you automate complex or time intensive processes such as assessments, planning and design, integration, and deployment of infrastructure.

Automation is the most reliable way to speed up the migration process while minimizing errors.

Automation-Driven Cloud Migration — An Introduction

Cloud migration automation allows us to migrate complex workloads to the cloud with zero data loss or downtime. Third-party tools can help establish automated migration strategies with full-fledged plans to effectively migrate your workload.

One approach is to outsource migration to Managed Service Providers who use various automation tools to smoothly migrate applications to the cloud. MSPs create automated migration and orchestration strategies. A test migration is sometimes used to validate these strategies before the entire workload is shifted. 

There are also various software providers that can help you generate migration plans and set orchestration rules. These tools provide information about predictable maintenance windows to keep the migration process almost effortless.

Key Benefits of Automation-Driven Cloud Migration 

Automated tools and strategies will make complex migration processes much simpler with automation-driven cloud migration. Here are some key benefits of this automated approach:

Reduce Migration Time

There are multiple processes involved in cloud migration. Each process comes with a set of challenges. Such complexities ultimately slow down the entire migration process and companies often face downtime due to delays. Automation is the only way to swiftly shift the workload without facing any downtime at all.

The automation tools cover up most of the manual processes for your legacy applications. You can then use the saved time to improve data integrity and structure. Moreover, the migration process is typically completed on time without any unnecessary delays due to manual work.

Lower Migration Costs

Repetitive tasks are often easily replaceable by automation tools and commands. These tools are much more cost-effective than manually repeating tasks, and they can be deployed across multiple environments.

Along with the reduction of cost, the automated migration also accelerates the processes with higher precision and less human error. Therefore, strategic and complex processes are often smoothly covered without any unnecessary iterations. 

Minimize Business Disruption

Having an incomplete or inferior migration strategy can result in data loss or downtime. By planning strategically and implementing fully automated migrations, with both external and internal live replications, you can prevent significant data loss and allow continuing migration without disruption. Automation solutions work reliably, and they are not prone to human errors that are often a leading cause of system downtime. 

Moreover, such automation solutions are well-versed in handling critical applications as well. They often use test migrations before they move a critical workload to the cloud. This significantly reduces any chances for disruption. 

The Steps for Executing Cloud Migration Automation

Cloud migration involves a lot of manual processes to automate with the help of a reliable solution. Nevertheless, Cloud Migration Automation requires addressing these key steps:

Cloud Assessment & Readiness

Every company needs to assess and analyze its current cloud readiness stance according to its resources and IT infrastructure. This assessment is helpful to analyze whether an organization is capable of shifting its workload to the cloud or not. In addition, such an assessment can be used to specify which workloads for critical applications must be migrated.

This process is only partially automated, but there are various tools such as AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and the AWS Migration Hub that are useful in the assessment stage. 

Design & Plan Migration

Many companies find it difficult to design and implement a migration plan based on their assessments. Workloads, infrastructure, and multiple environments can cause complexity. There are simply a ton of factors that must be considered during this step. Companies often start by establishing a goal of their migration, preparing environments, and implementing DevOps practices. Follow this approach, design cloud cost models, and introduce governance to organize all resources from the beginning. Furthermore, create configuration and deployment plans to develop a complete migration strategy.

Take Action & Build

This is a major step wherein you must start taking steps using a defined strategy. In automation-driven cloud migration, tools help automate the replication of business applications, machine data, and metadata without interfering with the normal functioning of the applications.

Use these tools to then store your data in cloud native format using snapshots before it reaches the deployment stage, where further automation takes place.

Deployment Stage

Automated orchestration helps with operational business application deployment on targeted cloud platforms, such as AWS. Many tools also use test migration strategies to perform functional and performance tests for ensuring a smooth migration without any delay.

Lastly, by strategizing your workload migration, you can plan for migrating during predictable windows reducing complexities or human errors. This makes cloud migration cost-effective as well as time-saving for those companies who wish to avoid all of the technical disruptions of a manual migration headache. 

Summary

Large organizations often go through complex manual processes before they reach the deployment stage of cloud migration. However, follow the above solutions to develop strategies and plan to build deployable cloud infrastructures without wasting resources on ineffective, time-taking and costly processes. 

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