Cloud migration refers to moving a company’s IT assets, services, databases, applications and other resources partially or entirely into the cloud. It can also refer to moving from one cloud provider to another (e.g. Amazon AWS to Microsoft Azure).
A cloud migration service is designed to help to facilitate this process by automating the many steps involved or by helping the process go more smoothly by identifying and eliminating any potential issues.
Before investing in cloud migration services, engage with a company with the experience to offer cloud migration consulting services. The purpose of this step is to help identify the benefits vs the potential risks and to figure out if the ROI of the migration would be a net benefit to the company.
Once you are confident that the organization wants to go ahead with a cloud migration, you should contact a cloud migration service provider to get assistance with the migration itself. This could be the same provider of the cloud migration consulting services or another vendor they recommend.
Why is the cloud important to business growth?
There are several reasons for business cloud migrations. Firstly, many companies wish to move from outdated and inefficient legacy infrastructure. This can be old servers, unreliable firewalls and routers and other hardware or software solutions that are underperforming or close to the end of life. Not only does migrating to the cloud give you an upgrade path to more recent technology, but it also reduces your overhead for maintenance and upgrading your servers. This is the responsibility of the cloud provider.
Eliminating the maintenance overhead makes cloud migration appealing for smaller businesses because you don’t have to worry about investing in hardware or maintenance to build your IT infrastructure. Cloud environments allow for the rapid expansion of a business, which is vital if your business is growing quickly. Deploying a new server or a new instance of a resource is simply a matter of a few clicks when in a cloud environment, compared to local infrastructure, which requires purchasing and configuring new equipment.
For businesses planning for rapid growth, a cloud service migration can make it much easier to expand and scale as your IT requirements grow. Cloud migration service providers commit to delivering very high uptime, as much as 99.9% in many cases, which means that your business can provide customers with a reliable experience. This flexibility and built-in resilience are crucial for a growing business to maintain high customer retention.
Overall migrating to the cloud is excellent for ensuring your IT infrastructure is modern, scalable, high performing and highly available, which is why partnering with a trusted cloud migration services business is an essential service for companies looking to grow by migrating to the cloud.
What are the benefits of cloud migration services?
- Cost reduction: This is one of the most significant cloud migration benefits. Migrating your IT infrastructure to the cloud can lead to a reduction in overall costs. It reduces the hardware your company needs and the associated maintenance costs. It also reduces labour costs because there is less demand for in-house IT staff.
- Scalability: Having your infrastructure hosted in a cloud environment allow for effortless and automatic scaling of resources as and when needed. Compare this to your local environment, where having more computing power or storage capacity would require you to invest in more servers and machines to meet demand.
- Improved end-user experience: Cloud service providers have servers in multiple geographic locations. Using load balancing and effective routing, it transfers user requests to server instances closest to the user for the fastest and most reliable service.
- Better resiliency: Migrating to the cloud makes it easy to take advantage of other services, such as data backups, where your data will be replicated and stored in remote servers in the cloud. This makes it very difficult for a single event to corrupt your data. Also, as your data is stored in the cloud, there is an extra layer of security.
- Better resource utilization: Cloud environments can be configured to only create as many resources/instances as are needed to perform a specific task. This makes it much easier for businesses to control the consumption of computing resources in the cloud, further limiting cost and improving overall efficiency.
What are common cloud migration challenges?
Migrating to the cloud should not be undertaken without the expert guidance of a trusted vendor that can identify and help mitigate potential issues. Here are some of the more common challenges of migrating to the cloud:
- Legacy applications: Before undertaking a migration, business owners must decide what to do with old applications that are difficult or unable to be migrated to the cloud. This means choosing between moving them, leaving them behind, and rebuilding or modifying them to suit the new environment.
- Understand dependencies: One of the biggest challenges with cloud migration is understanding the critical dependencies between systems and applications in the local environment. It’s essential to do this before migrating because if you don’t move all of the relevant pieces together, a service or application will not work as intended and can negatively impact the business.
- Application modernization: You need to understand the options for rebuilding or modifying your local applications to perform optimally in the cloud.
- Lack of skilled labour: Many companies don’t have employees that have experience with cloud migration, and this can make it challenging to make the transition smooth and makes it difficult to recover if things go wrong.
- Security and compliance: One of the most overlooked challenges of cloud migrations is ensuring that the new environment will meet the company’s security and compliance requirements. This is particularly important if you are in a regulated industry, as specific data cannot be stored outside the country. So it’s critical to understand where geographically your data is going to be stored in the cloud by your chosen cloud provider.
Choosing a trusted cloud migration partner
Small and medium-sized businesses often lack the internal expertise to scope and carry out a cloud migration. A good cloud migration services provider will work with their clients to understand their business and current infrastructure and can help manage their migration either partially or wholly into the cloud.
CG Technologies offers cloud migration consulting services to help you decide if migrating some or all of your IT infrastructure will be best for you. In addition to offering cloud migration consultation services, we also provide a full suite of cloud-based managed services.
We understand the cloud, how to migrate to it, and how to get the most value for your business. Contact us to discuss your cloud migration needs.
