A cloud migration is when a company moves some or all of its data center capabilities into the cloud, usually to run on the cloud-based infrastructure provided by a cloud service provider such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure.
As more and more companies have already transitioned to the cloud, cloud migrations are increasingly taking place within the cloud, as companies migrate between different cloud providers (known as cloud-to-cloud migration). But for those making the initial foray to the cloud, there are a few critical considerations to be aware of, which we’ll take a look at below.
This is part of our series of comprehensive guides about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
In this article, you will learn:
- What are the Main Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud?
- What are Common Cloud Migration Challenges?
- Cloud Migration Strategies
- A 4-Step Cloud Migration Process
- Migrating Data to the Cloud with NetApp Cloud Volumes
What are the Main Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud?
Here are some of the benefits that compel organizations to migrate resources to the public cloud:
- Scalability - cloud computing can scale to support larger workloads and more users, much more easily than on-premises infrastructure. In traditional IT environments, companies had to purchase and set up physical servers, software licenses, storage and network equipment to scale up business services.
- Cost - cloud providers take over maintenance and upgrades, companies migrating to the cloud can spend significantly less on IT operations. They can devote more resources to innovation - developing new products or improving existing products.
- Performance - migrating to the cloud can improve performance and end-user experience. Applications and websites hosted in the cloud can easily scale to serve more users or higher throughput, and can run in geographical locations near to end-users, to reduce network latency.
- Digital experience - users can access cloud services and data from anywhere, whether they are employees or customers. This contributes to digital transformation, enables an improved experience for customers, and provides employees with modern, flexible tools.
What are Common Cloud Migration Challenges?
Cloud migrations can be complex and risky. Here are some of the major challenges facing many organizations as they transition resources to the cloud.
Lack of Strategy
Many organizations start migrating to the cloud without devoting sufficient time and attention to their strategy. Successful cloud adoption and implementation requires rigorous end-to-end cloud migration planning. Each application and dataset may have different requirements and considerations, and may require a different approach to cloud migration. The organization must have a clear business case for each workload it migrates to the cloud.
Cost Management
When migrating to the cloud, many organizations have not set clear KPIs to understand what they plan to spend or save after migration. This makes it difficult to understand if migration was successful, from an economic point of view. In addition, cloud environments are dynamic and costs can change rapidly as new services are adopted and application usage grows.
Vendor Lock-In
Vendor lock-in is a common problem for adopters of cloud technology. Cloud providers offer a large variety of services, but many of them cannot be extended to other cloud platforms. Migrating workloads from one cloud to another is a lengthy and costly process. Many organizations start using cloud services, and later find it difficult to switch providers if the current provider doesn't suit their requirements.
Data Security and Compliance
One of the major obstacles to cloud migration is data security and compliance. Cloud services use a shared responsibility model, where they take responsibility for securing the infrastructure, and the customer is responsible for securing data and workloads.
So while the cloud provider may provide robust security measures, it is your organization’s responsibility to configure them correctly and ensure that all services and applications have the appropriate security controls.
The migration process itself presents security risks. Transferring large volumes of data, which may be sensitive, and configuring access controls for applications across different environments, creates significant exposure.
Cloud Migration Strategies
Gartner has identified five cloud migration techniques, known as the “5 Rs”. Organizations looking to migrate to the cloud should consider which migration strategy best answers their needs. The following is a brief description of each:
- Rehost. Rehosting, or ‘lift and shift,’ involves using infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). You simply redeploy your existing data and applications on the cloud server. This is easy to do and is thus suited for organizations less familiar with cloud environments. It is also a good option for cases where it is difficult to modify the code, and you want to migrate your applications intact.
- Refactor. Refactoring, or ‘lift, tinker, and shift,’ is when you tweak and optimize your applications for the cloud. In this case, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model is employed. The core architecture of the applications remain unchanged, but adjustments are made to enable the better use of cloud-based tools.
- Revise. Revising builds upon the previous strategies, requiring more significant changes to the architecture and code of the systems being moved to the cloud. This is done to enable applications to take full advantage of the services available in the cloud, which may require introducing major code changes. This strategy requires foreplanning and advanced knowledge.
- Rebuild. Rebuilding takes the Revise approach even further by discarding the existing code base and replacing it with a new one. This process takes a lot of time and is only considered when companies decide that their existing solutions don’t meet current business needs.
- Replace. Replacing is another solution to the challenges that inform the Rebuild approach. The difference here is that the company doesn’t redevelop its own native application from scratch. This involves migrating to a third-party, prebuilt application provided by the vendor. The only thing that you migrate from your existing application is the data, while everything else about the system is new.
A 4-Step Cloud Migration Process
1. Cloud Migration Planning
One of the first steps to consider before migrating data to the cloud is to determine the use case that the public cloud will serve. Will it be used for disaster recovery? DevOps? Hosting enterprise workloads by completely shifting to the cloud? Or will a hybrid approach work best for your deployment.
In this stage it is important to assess your environment and determine the factors that will govern the migration, such as critical application data, legacy data, and application interoperability. It is also necessary to determine your reliance on data: do you have data that needs to be resynced regularly, data compliance requirements to meet, or non-critical data that can possibly be migrated during the first few passes of the migration?
Determining these requirements will help you charter a solid plan for the tools you’ll need during migration, identifying which data needs to be migrated and when, if the data needs any scrubbing, the kind of destination volumes to use, and whether you’ll need encryption of the data both at rest and in transit.
Related content: read our guide to cloud migration tools.
2. Migration Business Case
Once you have determined your business requirements, understand the relevant services offered by cloud providers and other partners and their costs. Determine the expected benefits of cloud migration along three dimensions: operational benefits, cost savings, and architectural improvements.
Build a business case for every application you plan to migrate to the cloud, showing an expected total cost of ownership (TCO) on the cloud, compared to current TCO. Use cloud cost calculators to estimate future cloud costs, using realistic assumptions - including the amount and nature of storage used, computing resources, taking into account instance types, operating systems, and specific performance and networking requirements.
Work with cloud providers to understand the options for cost savings, given your proposed cloud deployment. Cloud providers offer multiple pricing models, and provide deep discounts in exchange for long-term commitment to cloud resources (reserved instances) or a commitment to a certain level of cloud spend (savings plans). These discounts must be factored into your business plan, to understand the true long-term cost of your cloud migration.
3. Cloud Data Migration Execution
Once your environment has been assessed and a plan has been mapped out, it’s necessary to execute your migration. The main challenge here is carrying out your migration with minimal disruption to normal operation, at the lowest cost, and over the shortest period of time.
If your data becomes inaccessible to users during a migration, you risk impacting your business operations. The same is true as you continue to sync and update your systems after the initial migration takes place. Every workload element individually migrated should be proven to work in the new environment before migrating another element.
You’ll also need to find a way to synchronize changes that are made to the source data while the migration is ongoing. Both AWS and Azure provide built-in tools that aid in AWS cloud migration and in Azure data migration, and later in this article we’ll see how NetApp users benefit from migrating with services and features that come with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
4. Ongoing Upkeep
Once that data has been migrated to the cloud, it is important to ensure that it is optimized, secure, and easily retrievable moving forward. It also helps to monitor for real-time changes to critical infrastructure and predict workload contentions.
Apart from real-time monitoring, you should also assess the security of the data at rest to ensure that working in your new environment meets regulatory compliance laws such as HIPAA and GDPR.
Another consideration to keep in mind is meeting ongoing performance and availability benchmarks to ensure your RPO and RTO objectives should they change.
Migrating Data to the Cloud with NetApp Cloud Volumes
Cloud migrations can be complex and contain a lot of moving parts. One of the most complex aspects of a migration, especially in a large enterprise, is moving and synchronizing large volumes of data.
NetApp’s cloud solutions can help simplify the migration process by providing tools that will help you move and sync data easily, quickly and securely. In this section we will discuss some of the benefits of using NetApp’s Cloud Volumes, which comes in two service models: the fully-managed Cloud Volumes Service and the hands-on Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
Faster Transfers, Lower Costs
With Cloud Volumes, NetApp provides several tools that help you automate, sync data faster, and secure your data while transitioning to the cloud. NetApp’s SnapMirror data replication technology gives Cloud Volumes ONTAP a way to seamlessly transition data and workloads into the cloud not just during the initial migration, but onwards with continuous synchronization according to the user’s pre-defined schedules. Cloud Volumes ONTAP storage efficiencies also help reduce network bandwidth costs during migrations by reducing storage footprint, which also accelerates data transfers.
For users of on-premises FAS or AFF ONTAP storage systems, SnapMirror enables you to seamlessly move data to or from the cloud as necessary for ongoing hybrid environment syncs. For migrations that are being carried out from systems that are not both ONTAP, Cloud Volumes Service offers Cloud Sync to carry out the migration between any kind of object-based storage repository.
High Availability with Cloud Volumes
This is one of the most important parameters to measure uptime. Some of the biggest cloud migration challenges that can impact your business continuity arise from failing to plan for issues such as drive failures, network misconfigurations, and Availability Zone failures. The Cloud Volumes HA configuration provides an AWS high availability infrastructure by maintaining two storage environments and synchronously writing to them during storage operations. This ensures that, from an application or end-user perspective, there is no downtime as there is a seamless transition to the secondary storage in case the primary storage fails.
In terms of SLA numbers, Cloud Volumes HA can help you achieve a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 60 seconds. The Multiple Availability Zone deployment model helps protect against Availability Zone failures. These features ensure that your cloud environment is resilient, safe from service disruptions, and able to host critical workloads as well as data migration processes without requiring expensive HA setup on the application side.
Data Protection
Cloud Volumes allows creation of application-aware snapshots that have no performance impact and consume minimal storage space. These snapshots are created in a matter of seconds irrespective of the size of the volume that is being copied. Instead of copying all the data in the system, NetApp Snapshots only copy the data that was changed by manipulating block pointers.
For ongoing migrations, these snapshots are low cost and highly efficient way to protect your system. And ONTAP snapshot creation can also be entirely automated in order to create backups, which for many users has benefits over using native AWS or Azure services for disk backup.
Cost Optimization
The major benefits of using Cloud Volumes ONTAP come with its storage efficiency features: thin provisioning, data compression, deduplication, and compaction as well as data tiering, and FlexClone writable clones. The storage efficiency features work in tandem to limit the amount of storage you consume and reduce data in transit costs. All together, these benefits can save a company as much as 50% to 70% in storage and data transfer costs.
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