Getting Started with AWS Cloud Migration

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.

Migrating to the cloud is a complex process that requires careful planning, execution, and ongoing management. Common mistakes can lead to increased costs and security vulnerabilities. Technical debt is hiding around every corner and your only weapon against it is knowledge.

What is cloud migration?

Cloud migration and modernization is anything essentially moving from one platform to another, be it from an on-prem data center to a database, or from Azure to AWS, or maybe even if you're moving from something like Amazon EC2 to Amazon ECS.

What is cloud migration automation?

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.

Why migrate to the cloud?

Leveraging cloud infrastructure over on premises can benefit an organization in many different ways, but the following are some of the major benefits that leave the biggest impact. Here are a few of the most significant perks that businesses experience after cloud migration:

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.

Scalability

Cloud architecture offers a scalable model for your business without any specific limit on resources. Businesses can scale according to their customers and needs. They can easily extend their current resources to scale up without disrupting the current functioning of their business.

Unlike traditional systems, you can expand your business on the cloud within the current infrastructure. This improves the efficiency, productivity, and overall growth of your business. 

Highest security

Application security is a major concern in our traditional systems. Many cloud providers such as AWS prioritize the security of their customers by using a “shared responsibility” model. In this model, both the customer and AWS are responsible for the security and compliance of networks, applications, and systems.

Agility & elasticity

Using 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. 

Cost

Traditional infrastructure carries multiple operational and maintenance costs. Due to fixed costs, business often pays for the extra resources they never used. 

However, a cloud provider only charges you based upon the resources used by your company. It significantly reduces your operational costs, and businesses can reinvest up to 70% of their saved costs back into their business.

Accessibility

Cloud data is accessible 24/7 without any downtime. Cloud infrastructure facilitates your business with instant access to your company data despite your location or time. However, traditional systems often undergo maintenance, and accessibility is also limited to the physical space.

Why consider cloud migration automation?

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. 

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 (Lift and Shift)

• Moving applications to the cloud without changes to their architecture, ideal for quick migrations to reduce costs or meet tight deadlines.

2. Re-platform (Lift, Tinker, and Shift)

• Migrating applications with minor optimizations to improve performance or scalability, such as using managed services like Amazon RDS.

3. Re-factor / Re-architect

• Redesigning applications to fully leverage cloud-native features like microservices or serverless, ideal for scaling or modernizing legacy systems.

4. Re-purchase

• Replacing an application with a new cloud-based solution, such as switching to a SaaS product to meet business needs.

5. Retire

• Decommissioning applications that are no longer needed, reducing costs and complexity.

6. Retain (Re-visit)

• Keeping certain applications on-premises or delaying migration until a later time due to dependencies or low priority.

Cloud migration process

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 fivesteps:

Assessment

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. 

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. 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.

Tips for successful cloud migration

There are plenty of things to consider while migrating your business operations to a cloud but acting on these few tips can save you from all the chaos:

Develop a clear vision for your cloud migration

Cloud Infrastructure should fulfill your business goals by providing all the necessary resources for the best outcomes. 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.

Plan your cloud migration

Jumping right into the deep end and failing to plan adequately for a cloud migration will ultimately slow you down. Moving too fast lands companies with technical debt and can lead to a refactoring cycle where no application in your portfolio is truly living up to its potential. Skipping a comprehensive planning and refactoring stage lands many organizations with lifted and shifted infrastructure, replicating your data center environment and failing to unlock the potential of the cloud. 

What are you hoping to achieve by moving to the cloud? Writing some goals for your migration will give you a target to hit. Maybe you’re getting ready to handle an influx of new users and your application must be scalable. Or perhaps you’re looking to take advantage of infrastructure as code to simplify your deployment process. Whether it’s cost savings or application performance, setting your goal ahead of time will help you to define success for your migration. 

Focus on setting expectations for and migrating one application at a time. For each, consider whether it will be a good candidate for refactoring before starting a migration. Refactoring can be costly due to the engineering expertise required, but spending time to refactor and optimize your new infrastructure will pay dividends in the long run.

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.

Prioritize your migration

A migration strategy includes prioritizing and selecting all the processes for a smooth shift. Prioritization helps you migrate those applications that pose the lowest risk to your business. Consider prioritizing your First-Mover Workloads

Calculate costs beforehand

Managing resources effectively can help to reduce your costs significantly. Consider tools like Migration Evaluator, Cloudamize, and CloudChomp to calculate everything while shifting to the cloud.

7 steps to improving data security during cloud migration

To prevent hacking attempts during your own business-critical migration processes, follow these seven steps and tips to improve data security during your own cloud migration.

1. Assess the current data situation. Evaluate your existing data across multiple databases to identify and differentiate critical and non-essential data. This step ensures data aligns with retention policies, reducing risk during migration.
2. Understand your compliance regime. Align data controls with regulatory requirements specific to your industry (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR). Compliance ensures you avoid penalties and fines during data migration by adhering to relevant regulations.
3. Choose the right data security tools. Select appropriate data security tools provided by your cloud vendor to secure the migration process. Choosing the right tools ensures effective security measures without overspending on unnecessary solutions.
4. Manage authorized personnel for data access. Implement strict access control, limiting data access to authorized personnel and using two-factor authentication. This step prevents unauthorized access and protects sensitive data during the migration process.
5. Encrypt data during transit. Use encryption protocols and network security controls to safeguard data while it is in transit. Encryption is crucial to prevent third-party interception and protect data from vulnerabilities during transfer.
6. Plan decommissioning activities for remaining data center. Develop a decommissioning plan for on-premise media, including data sanitization and equipment removal. Proper decommissioning secures physical assets and ensures that no sensitive data is left exposed post-migration.
7. Strategically wipe remaining data drives. Work with IT asset disposition (ITAD) vendors to securely wipe all remaining data drives. Securely wiping drives ensures no residual data is vulnerable, completing the decommissioning process safely.

The Caylent approach to cloud migration

Migrating to the cloud, especially if your organization is new to the technology, can be extremely daunting. This may lead to a feeling of overwhelm and, with a lack of support, cloud paralysis. But here’s the thing: it’s okay to ask for help. Many organizations choose to hire a partner to offer cloud expertise in this scenario. 

If you’re keen to prioritize and plan your migration road map, contact Caylent as a preferred AWS Partner to support you in a successful move to the cloud. Whether it’s expertise on identifying first-mover workloads or a complete platform re-architecture, we can help you get up and running fast with tools and self-service capabilities your development team will love.

From migrating and modernizing your infrastructure, building cloud native applications & leveraging data for insights, to implementing DevOps practices within your organization, Caylent can help set you up for innovation on the AWS Cloud. Get in touch with our team to discuss how we can help you achieve your goals.

Next Action

Want to learn how to optimize your data infrastructure to support data governance and security measures? Check out our Data Modernization on AWS eBook.