Cloud Migration: The Full Guide to Benefits, Process, and Types

Today’s IT leaders face constant pressure to innovate, reduce costs, and remain agile. Given the rapid pace of economic and technological change, legacy on-premises infrastructure can struggle to keep pace. Cloud migration offers a compelling solution, promising a path to true digital transformation. 

This comprehensive guide is designed to equip you with the knowledge and strategies needed to navigate your organization's cloud migration journey. Whether you're considering a full-scale migration or a more strategic hybrid approach, this guide will empower you to make informed decisions and ensure a smooth transition for your organization. 

Shortcuts:

• What is Cloud Migration?
• Why Cloud Migration?
• What Are the Benefits of Cloud Migration?
• Types of Cloud Migration
• What Are the Stages of the Cloud Migration Process?
• 7 Best Practices For Cloud Migration Success
• Unlock More Effective Cloud Migration Management With Ardoq
• What To Do Next

What is Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration commonly refers to the process of moving your business applications, data, and IT infrastructure from an on-premises data center to a cloud environment. This can involve a variety of cloud models, including:

• Public Cloud: Using shared resources from a cloud service provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Private Cloud: Creating a dedicated cloud environment for your organization, either using your own servers in-house or hosted by a service provider with a high degree of isolation and control.
• Hybrid Cloud: Combining elements of public and private cloud environments to create a flexible and scalable solution that caters to diverse application needs.

Migrating from one cloud provider is also possible, and can be useful when an organization wants to take advantage of different cloud platforms' products, services, and pricing. Some organizations find they end up using multiple clouds—often due to mergers and acquisitions—and decide to consolidate resources between different cloud services using cloud to cloud migration.

Why Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but a valuable step for businesses aiming to remain competitive in today's digital landscape. The move to the cloud unlocks critical advantages for businesses, from access to innovation and improved efficiency to scalability and operational mobility.

Businesses generally move to the cloud based on a combination of ‘push’ factors, such as hardware obsolescence and the costs of maintaining and managing on-premises systems, along with ‘pull’ factors such as improved disaster recovery and access to software integrations that improve workflows.

When Should a Business Migrate to the Cloud?

Cloud migration is a strategic initiative that can transform business through increased agility, improved scalability, enhanced security, and access to cutting-edge technologies. There's no one-size-fits-all checklist to indicate when a business should consider migrating operations to the cloud, but the initiative is often driven by the need for a business to become more agile and innovative.

That said, there are several key motivations to look out for that can indicate your business is ready for cloud migration.

Scaling Challenges

As your business grows, your IT infrastructure may struggle to keep pace with increasing demands for processing power, storage, and bandwidth. If you find yourself constantly adding new hardware or facing limitations on scalability, the cloud offers a readily available solution with on-demand resources.

Likewise, if you reduce your reliance on your current software tools and IT infrastructure, the cloud makes it easy to scale down rapidly without the burden of committed investment to hardware.

Aging Infrastructure

Maintaining outdated hardware and software can be costly and inefficient. Legacy systems may be nearing the end of their support lifecycle, making them vulnerable to security risks and potentially incompatible with newer technologies. Upgrading these systems can be a significant investment. Cloud migration eliminates the need for expensive upgrades and ensures access to the latest technologies.

Security Concerns

Cybersecurity threats are constantly evolving, and maintaining a robust security posture in-house can be a complex and resource-intensive task. It requires specialist attention and constant investment to keep security systems up-to-date and rigorous.

While the security responsibility will ultimately remain with the customer, cloud providers can significantly reduce the burden of managing day-to-day security operations. Cloud providers offer a high level of security with features like:

• Multi-factor authentication and single sign-on (SSO) to add an extra layer of protection for user access.
• Regular security patching and vulnerability scanning to identify and address potential security weaknesses.
• Advanced intrusion detection and prevention systems to monitor for and block malicious activity.

Remote Work Requirements

The ability to support a remote workforce is becoming increasingly important. The drivers of this need range from greater geographical presence, to employee wellbeing and productivity, to the overheads required in maintaining physical operations.

Cloud-based solutions facilitate remote work by making applications and data accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. This takes location out of the productivity equation.

Desire for Innovation

The pressure for businesses to improve productivity while reducing cost has never been greater. Any advantage that helps businesses do more with less can provide a valuable edge over their competitors—or at least keep them from falling behind.

Developing proprietary versions of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), while potentially beneficial, requires significant investment of resources. One way to avoid taking on such a significant burden could lie in accessing off-the-shelf versions of innovations available via the cloud.

What Are the Benefits of Cloud Migration?

The tight margins and uncertain economic environments of the present day force businesses to find ways to improve agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Cloud migration has emerged as an effective strategy to meet these goals.

The cloud plays a vital role in helping businesses achieve end-to-end digital transformation, positioning them to gain the efficiency needed to remain competitive and providing the technological foundation to take advantage of innovation. The agile nature of the cloud also gives businesses the flexibility to adapt, reinvent, and to outmaneuver uncertainty. 

Here are six of the most significant benefits of cloud migration.

1. Increased Scalability and Agility

Cloud resources are readily available on-demand, allowing businesses to easily scale computing, storage, and network resources immediately without the need to await infrastructure purchases. When demand spikes—for example as a result of seasonal variation—the business can adapt by altering the cloud resources instantly. 

Organizations can use the resources as long as needed and will be charged only for the cloud resources they use, which helps eliminate extraneous costs and grants greater operational control to the business. This agility fosters faster development cycles and quicker time-to-market for new products and services.

2. Reduced Costs

Migrating to the cloud eliminates the need for capital expenditure on expensive hardware and software upgrades. The shift from huge capital outlays in a local data center to modest recurring monthly operational expenses in the cloud can help a business better manage project budgets and cost forecasting.

The flexibility and scalability inherent in the cloud means cloud migration presents the opportunity to realize significant savings in resource, maintenance, and real estate costs. Cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go billing models, allowing you to only pay for the resources you use.

The connectedness of cloud services allows businesses to streamline IT infrastructure management and optimize workflows, reducing overheads and improving overall productivity.

3. Enhanced Security and Compliance

Cloud providers invest heavily in advanced security measures, offering a robust and constantly monitored environment for data and applications. Many public clouds have built-in security features and specialized cloud security tools to help ensure that an organization's resources are protected. 

Cloud security features like automatic patching, vulnerability scanning, and multi-factor authentication significantly improve the business’ security posture. Many cloud providers also offer compliance certifications that align with industry regulations.

4. Improved Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Cloud providers offer robust disaster recovery (DR) solutions that ensure data and applications remain accessible even in case of unforeseen disruptions. These solutions typically involve replicating the data and applications across geographically distributed data centers.

Cloud services mitigate some pressure by reducing reliance on local data centers, giving businesses the chance to decrease local data center footprints. When unforeseen or unavoidable disasters cause significant local outages, having IT infrastructure across distributed data centers really proves its worth, allowing business continuity thanks to intentional redundancy that absorbs the demand created by those local outages. 

5. Empowering Remote Work

Cloud-based solutions facilitate remote work by making applications and data accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. This fosters improved collaboration and communication within teams and across locations, promoting a more flexible and productive work environment.

The geographically-agnostic nature of the cloud gives businesses the opportunity to hire for roles based on skill set fit rather than proximity to an office. This flexibility also allows businesses to provide follow-the-sun customer support by employing agents in distributed locations. 

6. Access to Innovation

Embracing the cloud opens doors to a wealth of new technologies, empowering businesses to innovate rapidly. Cloud platforms offer access to pre-built AI and ML services that can be easily integrated with an organization’s existing applications, enabling them to innovate and develop new solutions without significant upfront investment.

Cloud-based software-as-a-service applications are easier and faster to upgrade, giving customers of those applications earlier access to innovations deployed on them. That early access can give businesses the edge to outperform their competitors and position themselves as market leaders.

While the benefits of cloud migration are clear and manifold, the process isn’t without its challenges. The complex nature of cloud migration means it presents its fair share of potential hurdles. Business needs, budgets, and security and compliance requirements are constantly changing. 

A reliable cloud migration strategy should account for and tackle all of these challenges head-on, which is why Ardoq created this guide to overcoming cloud migration challenges.

Types of Cloud Migration

The cloud migration approach you choose will depend on factors like your existing infrastructure, application types, and desired outcomes. Carefully evaluating your existing environment and desired outcomes will help you choose the most appropriate cloud migration strategy for each application.

Here's an overview of the six main cloud migration strategies:

What Are the Stages of the Cloud Migration Process?

Navigating the migration process and unlocking the full potential of the cloud requires careful planning, a deep understanding of best practices, and the right tools. In cloud migration, planning is everything. You’re moving the company’s digital assets, services, databases, and applications partially or wholly to the cloud. 

Cloud migration is a big project with big consequences, so a successful migration requires a well-defined process with clear stages. It’s important to develop an awareness of different migration approaches, the stages involved in the process, and best practices to ensure a smooth and successful transition. Here's a brief overview of the seven key cloud migration phases:

1. Define Your Scope: Plan a cloud migration strategy with clear metrics on effort, change impact, and time to value. Define success in line with what really matters in the organization and what kind of business value it brings.

2. Ensure You Have the Right Data: High-quality data will equip you to make calculations, strategically rate your applications, evaluate alternatives, and select the correct migration strategy. 

3. Evaluate Your Application Portfolio: Base your evaluation on an application’s business value and its technical fit. Sort your applications into a framework such as Gartner’s Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, and Eliminate (TIME) model to help you identify which actions to take.

4. Consider How You Are Going to Migrate: Decide which key applications will migrate to the cloud and where key business stakeholders should be involved to ensure alignment.

5. Prioritize Your Migration Candidates: Narrow down your list of applications by identifying the top actionable candidates. Each application requires its own analysis.

6. Impact Assessment: This helps you take a closer look at the opportunities and assess all aspects of the application to validate eligibility. Conducting an impact assessment sets you up for success in the next step: the business case.

7. Present the Business Case and Execute: Once you have a solid plan and stakeholder buy-in, it’s easy to put into motion and repeat continuously. Use your business case to establish initiatives to analyze and realize the outcome of the migration efforts on an ongoing basis.

Ready to make the leap? Follow our 7 Steps for Cloud Migration Planning and enhance your chances of success.

7 Best Practices For Cloud Data Migration Success

Cloud migrations are immensely valuable for many businesses and even necessary for some. The process is not without its challenges, however. Among the most common are the following:

• Complexity of planning and execution: The cloud migration process involves multiple moving parts and requires careful planning to avoid disruptions.
• Security concerns: Data migration and ongoing cloud security require robust strategies to ensure data privacy and compliance.
• Application compatibility: Not all applications are readily compatible with the cloud environment, and some may require refactoring or re-platforming.
• Change management: Transitioning to the cloud can impact workflows and user experience. Effective change management is crucial for user adoption.

There’s a wealth of information and expertise out there to help teams mitigate these challenges and ensure a smooth and successful migration to the cloud. When approaching a cloud migration, follow these best practices to give your project the best chance of success.

Effective Planning

This is arguably the most crucial best practice. Develop a comprehensive cloud migration strategy that considers all aspects of the process, from business goals to technical requirements. Build and follow a bespoke cloud migration checklist to bring structure to your approach.

Architecture platforms like Ardoq will help you create a detailed cloud migration plan that maps application dependencies, migration approaches, timelines, and resource allocation. Ardoq's visual modeling capabilities can help visualize your IT landscape, identify potential roadblocks, and ensure a well-coordinated migration effort.

Phased Approach

Don't attempt to migrate everything at once. A phased approach allows you to test and refine your migration process with lower-risk applications before tackling mission-critical ones. This minimizes disruption and allows for course correction if needed.

Skilled Cloud Team

Assemble a team with the necessary expertise for cloud migration. This may include cloud architects, engineers, security specialists, and change management professionals. Consider partnering with experienced cloud service providers (CSPs) who can offer valuable guidance and migration expertise.

Security-first Mindset

Security should be a top priority throughout the migration process. Conduct thorough security assessments of your existing environment and implement robust security measures in the cloud, including access controls, data encryption, and regular vulnerability scanning.

Cost Optimization

Cloud migration presents an opportunity to optimize IT costs. Carefully analyze your cloud resource usage and take advantage of features like pay-as-you-go billing and right-sizing instances to avoid unnecessary expenses. Cloud cost management tools can help you track spending and identify opportunities for optimization.

Change Management

Proactive change management is key to user adoption and a successful transition. Communicate the benefits of cloud migration to stakeholders, provide comprehensive training on new cloud-based applications and processes, and address user concerns effectively.

Continuous Monitoring and Optimization

The cloud migration journey doesn't end after the final application is migrated. Continuously monitor the performance, security, and cost-efficiency of your cloud environment. Regularly evaluate your cloud architecture and identify opportunities for further optimization.

Cloud migration can be a transformative initiative, driving agility, innovation, and cost savings for many organizations. By following these best practices and making use of valuable Enterprise Architecture tools like Ardoq, you can effectively navigate the cloud migration process and unlock the full potential of the cloud for your enterprise.

Unlock More Effective Cloud Migration Management With Ardoq

With cloud migration being an extensive, large-scale project, it’s crucial to get it right, or risk exhausting the company’s resources. A properly formulated and executed plan will ensure success. This is why enterprises turn to market-leading tools like Ardoq’s Cloud Migration planning solution.

Using Ardoq to carry out a cloud migration program allows you to confidently identify risks, assign and monitor key metrics, visualize dependencies, and formulate a plan to address challenges.

Conducting surveys through Ardoq helps with assessing the cloud readiness of applications based on cost, complexity, technical fit, and business value. Creating a cloud metamodel helps illustrate the critical relationships within the organization. Using data-based visualizations, reports, and Scenarios allows stakeholders to share key findings and align teams, keeping a grip on change management.

What To Do Next

Cloud technology has emerged as an immensely valuable solution for global organizations, making on-premise to cloud migration worth the effort. Cloud-based services offer a compelling alternative to traditional on-premises IT infrastructure, empowering businesses to unlock a range of benefits and gain a competitive edge. That’s why cloud migration is such an important consideration in business.

Cloud migration is not just a technological shift; it's a strategic opportunity to transform and optimize your IT infrastructure. By embracing the cloud, you can achieve greater agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency—all while enhancing security and empowering innovation. 

Navigating a successful cloud migration journey requires careful planning, a deep understanding of your IT landscape, and the right tools to manage the transition effectively. This guide has provided the knowledge to assess your organization's cloud readiness, explore different migration strategies, and understand the key stages involved. But the journey doesn't end here.

Next Steps in Your Cloud Migration Process

• Conduct a cloud readiness assessment: Evaluate your current IT infrastructure, applications, and data to identify potential migration challenges and opportunities.
• Develop a cloud migration strategy: Align your migration strategy with your overall IT and business goals, considering factors like budget, timeline, and desired level of control.
• Choose the right cloud partner: Select a cloud provider that offers the services, security features, and scalability you need to meet your specific business requirements.
• Embrace best practices: Implement best practices like detailed planning, expert guidance, rigorous attention to security, and robust change management to ensure a successful transition.

The Role of Enterprise Architecture

Ardoq understands the complexities of cloud migration and offers a powerful solution to simplify the process. Our platform provides the tools and insights you need to:

• Visualize your IT landscape: Gain a clear understanding of your application and data dependencies with automated dependency mapping.
• Optimize cloud resource allocation: Identify cost-saving opportunities and ensure efficient use of cloud resources.
• Proactively manage risks: Assess potential migration risks and implement strategies to mitigate them.
• Collaborate seamlessly: Foster collaboration between all stakeholders involved in the migration process.
• Build a future-proof cloud architecture: Design a scalable and adaptable cloud environment that supports your long-term IT strategy.

Contact Ardoq today to schedule a free consultation and discuss how Enterprise Architecture tools can form the foundation of your cloud migration process.