Meeting Cloud Migration Requirements: Key Considerations

Operating in the cloud brings efficiency to your business process, but to optimize data center consolidation, organizations must meet cloud migration requirements. Take advantage of all of the cloud's benefits by learning about the key requirements of migrating away from an on-site, IT-controlled system to a cloud-hosted platform.

Table Of Contents

• The Business and Technical Elements of Cloud Migration Requirements
  • The Technical Cloud Migration Requirements
• The Infrastructure Assessment and Planning To Meet Cloud Migration Requirements
  • Migration Options
  • Single Cloud or Multi-Cloud
  • Infrastructure Options
• The Importance of Developing a Migration Plan
• The Need for Data Management and Security
  • Cloud migration Requirements for Security
• Help with Cloud Migration Requirements

The Business and Technical Elements of Cloud Migration Requirements

Given the investment cloud migration takes, it’s best for you to identify why you are making the change and what you stand to gain from embracing the cloud. Businesses move onto the cloud for several reasons:

• Improve end-user satisfaction
• Enhance and improve collaboration within the organization
• Reduce or eliminate the expensive upkeep of legacy software
• Increase cybersecurity

Cloud usage is growing across all industries. Just in the legal sector, 70% of surveyed firms are employing some form of cloud platform.

Ensuring business, technical and cultural readiness is crucial before beginning the migration process. Key things to consider are:

• the user requirements.
• the functionality of the applications.
• the challenges of integration.

Technical Cloud Migration Requirements

Technical readiness means ensuring that the migrated assets' landing zone meets the workload's minimum requirements. The compatibility of an application in the target environment, technical dependencies like data sources and middleware, and performance and scalability requirements are just a few of the technical details to figure out.

Working with your migration provider gives you a better idea of the specific cloud migration tools needed. The company’s network connection and the software and hardware for specific devices may need adjustments to function optimally with the new application.

The Infrastructure Assessment and Planning To Meet Cloud Migration Requirements

Migration involves taking data from a legacy, on-site system and moving it to the cloud, and there are potential risks that could interfere with this conversion. Data loss, failure of the source application (or system) and extended downtime are just a few of the challenges common with some migrations. Knowing how your current infrastructure will interact with the new application can help prevent these concerns.

Ask the following questions when devising a plan:

• Is a redesign of an application needed, or can it be moved as is?
• How complex would a redesign be, if necessary?
• Are there any migration options or services that don’t need to reconfigure workloads?
• Does the organization need a public, private or multi-cloud environment?

Efficient migration requires advanced planning and a timeline. Enough resources should be in place to support the effort, with a follow-up testing plan in place to determine how migrated applications are functioning. Post-migration support should include user training, maintenance and updates as necessary.

Migration Options

Cloud migration requirements include deciding on the tools for moving data. There are two basic options: shallow cloud integration or deep cloud integration. With shallow cloud integration, also called a lift-and-shift approach, there are few or no changes made to the servers moving to the cloud for running the applications. It doesn't involve any cloud-unique services; it’s simply doing enough to the existing applications to run them in the new environment.

Deep cloud integration completely modifies an application in order to take full advantage of key cloud capabilities. This could be as sophisticated as working with serverless computing for aspects of an application, accessing a cloud-specific data store or using dynamic load balance and auto-scaling.

Single Cloud or Multi-Cloud

Determine your cloud provider when looking at migration requirements. It’s usually simpler to optimize your application for a single cloud provider, and it makes it easier for your team when there is only one set of cloud APIs to navigate. A multi-cloud approach splits applications across different providers.

Infrastructure Options

Your cloud migration requirements depend on your final infrastructure. These cloud computing service models can be used individually, though mid-sized to large operations generally use more than one. Three common options for setting up cloud infrastructure include:

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service
• Platform-as-a-Service
• Software-as-a-Service

An IaaS provides on-demand access to virtual and physical cloud-hosted servers, storage and networking to support workloads and running applications in the cloud. PaaS is on-demand access to a cloud-hosted platform that is complete and ready to use for developing, running and managing applications. SaaS provides on-demand access to cloud-hosted, ready-to-use application software.

The Importance of Developing a Migration Plan

Once you establish the infrastructure to meet your cloud migration requirements, it’s important to develop a migration plan. It makes sense to start off by migrating services that have the fewest dependencies. This usually means internal services first. The last services to migrate are the outermost services or those which are the closest to the customers. This minimizes downtime and service disruptions.

You also need to determine any factors important to the migration process, such as:

• Application and legacy data
• Application interoperability
• Encryption
• Resynch schedule
• Data compliance requirements
• Data scrubbing

Look at the impact of these factors on your operations as well as their migration options to guide you on the timeline and specific migration functions that need to happen.

The Need for Data Management and Security

Your migration efforts and the final applications still need to comply with industry and government security standards. You also need to make sure none of your data is compromised during the process. Areas of data to ensure security include:

• Client documentation
• HR records
• Collaboration data
• Appointments or schedules
• Personal and company data
• Financials

You need to work with your provider to determine how to address the key security risks of cloud migration. Ask about unauthorized access, provider vulnerabilities, data leaks and breaches, encryption services, data privacy and residency regulatory compliance.

Cloud Migration Requirements for Security

Your provider should follow a specific safety and compliance approach. These elements are common to most security strategies:

• Implementing strong access control
• Regularly updating and conducting systematic reviews of security configurations to align with best practices
• Monitoring and securing APIs with proper authentication, rate limiting and authorization mechanisms
• Establishing strong encryption processes and strategies

Work closely with your cloud service provider to train your team on best practices for maintaining security, as well as ensuring compliance with all regulatory and industry standards.

Help With Cloud Migration Requirements

If you need help understanding and meeting cloud migration requirements to successfully transition your data, Cloudficient can help. We give you a way to efficiently leverage cloud-based services and hosting to help your business operations. We protect your information and provide a revolutionary approach to retiring your legacy systems. Contact us today to learn more about our scalable, affordable and expert services.