In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, business organizations have forgone the traditional work environment and adapted a more dynamic, innovative option to respond to the current crisis. It is Cloud Migration. Migrating into Cloud now could be the most profitable and appropriate strategy to accelerate business continuity when working remotely.
The remote workforce is the most prominent business transition that organizations have faced in 2020. However, it has been challenging – uncontrollable IT disruptions and software and collaborative tools outages. The challenges have heavily affected business continuity across the globe. AWS migration, Cloud-based services, and Cloud-based infrastructure must respond to the crisis and increase business continuity.
Cloud-Based Infrastructure – How and Why COVID-19 has Accelerated Business Cloud Migration?
The pandemic has transformed 80% of organizations across the USA, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand into remote workforces, according to the LogicMonitor Survey. However, the report further reveals that the sudden shift to a remote working system stirred disruptions that affected normal operations, especially IT infrastructure – productivity, hardware and software, and other tools. Many professionals (around 70%) confessed to endure challenges like security issues, outages, network strains, stability, and productivity.
That does not say that the companies who already had a remote workforce before the pandemic didn’t face any problems – they did. But they recovered quickly, as they were already were equipped to deal with the crisis.
Hybrid Cloud Solutions – an Increase of 25% since 2019
So, how are other companies tackling the situation? Here are recent trends that we came across from a definite survey:
- Before the pandemic hit, only 65% of the organizations (survey respondents) had a cloud connection. The number increased to 85% in six months.
- 90% of the organizations deployed Cloud-based strategies in the first quarter of 2020
- Cloud adaption is slower in SMEs
- Some companies had begun the cloud migration process in 2019
- Trends indicate that within the next five years, 75% of companies across the globe will be working in a cloud environment
- Cloud-based solutions are essential for companies that locate system users within the physical environment. More such companies have started strategizing Cloud-based software shift
- Hybrid cloud solutions not only have eased the accessibility during the pandemic but also has helped in business continuity and scalability
What is our Successful Cloud Migration Strategy?
CG Vak is one of the leading Cloud-based application development providers that has also received the “Covid-19 Endurance Award” last month for being the only company to have grown amidst the lockdown and pandemic.
Being on the Cloud will never slow your business down – pandemic or otherwise – will promote digital transformation, increased scalability, agility, and work efficiency.
Being in the business for so long, we have heard many professionals asking us to migrate only critical business applications to the Cloud. Some of them successfully made the shift, while others struggled. With Cloud connection being the best response to the crisis, we have created a Cloud migration checklist to ensure a smooth transition and integration.
Learn the Risks of Cloud Migration
Cloud migration is not easy, especially for companies that run on ‘paper-based, binder-based, and store-in-the-shelf’ business. There are other constraints, too – massive data, uncategorized data, lack of resource, on-premise infrastructure, data privacy, and data security.
Some of the challenges that companies face while adopting cloud solutions are listed below.
Challenges of Full-Scale Cloud Migration
Industry Regulations:
Companies that operate in a highly- regulated industry or enclose a massive amount of intellectual property cannot shift everything on the cloud due to regulatory compliance and other adhering policies, such as HIPAA and GDPR. However, it is not entirely impossible.
Security Issues:
Data security and privacy are of paramount importance in data migration. Data on cloud computing is encrypted, providing several layers of cloud-based security services. On the other hand, on-premise data can be a victim of several risks and vulnerabilities, such as outages, human error, system failure, malware attack, etc.
Shortage of Resources:
Cloud-based software migration will require dedicated expert resources, which most companies fail to have. This could cause inconsistency and skill gaps in migration.
Strategy Build-up:
Firms with big data have to painstakingly sort through volumes of data to determine the kind of data they have – the ones that they need, the vulnerable ones, and the ones that are classified – before they decide where the data should go.
Despite the challenges, Cloud migration is booming, enabling 80% of global organizations to move to the cloud by the end of next year. It is a reality. Relying upon on-premises will put your data at the risk of a single-point-of-failure, which could result in breach, loss, corruption, or leak of data. On-premise applications will also put your firm behind innovations, as you will miss out on the latest ways to grow, scale, promote, and develop.
Best Practices for Cloud Migration Strategy
The following practices will give you significant control over your data, which we promptly use in our planning and execution. This will also ensure data privacy and safety throughout the migration process.
Data Classification:
The first cloud migration step is classifying the data, as it will help you understand your data and gauge it appropriately to make the journey comfortable. It includes identifying sensitive data, places where data are located, and sorting the data into four categories –Classified, Restricted, Public, and Private.
Data Policies Assignment:
This practice will help you establish control and protection for each tier and type of data. They could include watermarking, access control, expiration data, passcodes, etc., based on sensitivity and cruciality. You can grant control over data to select authorities or users.
Development of Access Control and Role-based Authentication:
The practice allows you to manage and trace data actions and consequences in the Cloud in real-time. Automatic notification, security, and tracking tools will help you identify and mitigate risks in real-time.
External Auditing:
Third-party audits help you identify weak links in your data that can potentially put the rest in danger. If you are in the legal or healthcare industry, this is a mandatory step, as 75% of data comprises vital and compromised client records and deeds. With penetration testing and SOC audits, you can eliminate the risk of value-chain attacks.
Crucial 9 Cloud Application Migration Steps
To avoid pitfalls and ensure all your problems are solved, we will build a 9-point checklist of your business’s crucial areas that require addressing on a priority basis. The checklist includes the following:
1. Develop the architecture of the cloud migration process at the system-level. It outlines the technical plans, defines the required do up to make the shift effective, creates the strategies, and identifies the solution requirement, the priorities, and migration mechanism.
2. Choose between shallow cloud integration and deep cloud integration. Shallow cloud integration is also known as the ‘lift and shift’ process, where we don’t make changes in the running applications. We neither use any unique cloud data migration solutions. Deep cloud integration allows users to make changes in the applications to utilize the benefits of Cloud-based networking solutions.
3. Pick between a single cloud provider and multiple cloud migration service providers. There are pros and cons to both. However, splitting between two and more service providers will allow you to utilize the best services that each provider offers.
4. Define your applications and services’ Key Performance Indicators or (KPIs) for cloud migration to evaluate their performances against your set expectations.
5. Develop application and service performance baselines that will enable you to evaluate the current performance of service or application to define their post-migration performance. You can refer to the baselines during the migration process to ensure you are on the right track.
6. Prioritize how you would like to migrate your applications to Cloud – all at once, service by service, or component by component.
7. Redesign, refurbish, or refactor services or applications before you shift to Cloud so that they perform effectively in the new environment. This will help you utilize your resources and scale your applications better, besides boosting ROI.
8. Establish a viable cloud-data migration strategy, as shifting data is the trickiest part of cloud migration. If data-access is not handled accurately, it can significantly impact the performance of databases. We provide different options to fulfill this, including bi-directional synchronization, on-way synchronization, or use of AWS migration services.
9. Decide how you will switch your production from the legacy environment to cloud – all at once or bit by bit. Talk to our developers about the pros and cons. This also depends upon the size, complexity, and architecture of your applications.
Cost comparison in cloud migration
When it comes to cost, running applications and services in a legacy system is always high compared to cloud pricing. However, this could change depending upon several factors. However, the costs are different in both – running an on-premise infrastructure system may incur many hidden costs. The running costs are generally not crystal-clear. However, with cloud computing, you will receive a monthly bill from the service provider, with no hidden costs. Besides, cloud cost is usually OpEx (Operating Expenses), while on-premise is CapEx (Capital Expenses). It depends upon the type of business you have too.
In most cases, AWS migration has helped our clients to reduce costs significantly. Based on your financial models, we can help you calculate and compare cloud migration costs using different options (AWS TCO or Azure Pricing Calculator). It will allow you to pick the best option that suits your current infrastructure and financial goals.
Summing Up
Cloud-based solutions can solve 80% of your on-premise problems during this pandemic. And it is just the beginning of the cloud computing era – the capabilities are just going to magnify with time. CG-VAK can help you host your resources via three different cloud models, Hybrid, Private, and Public. However, Hybrid is the most in-demand now, for being a healthy recipe of public and private Cloud’s high availability, reduced costs, and reliability.
We have helped many companies secure their data, simplify processes, and deploy remote workforce via the Cloud. Learn how we can help you in your business continuity plan during the pandemic.