What is Cloud Migration?
Cloud migration is the process of transferring data, applications and services from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-based platform. This involves moving workloads from physical data centres to a cloud provider’s servers. The goal is to leverage the benefits of cloud computing, such as scalability, cost-efficiency and flexibility.
Benefits:
- Cost reduction: Eliminates the need for on-premises hardware, software and maintenance costs.
- Scalability: Easily adjust resources based on demand, avoiding overprovisioning or underutilisation.
- Improved agility: Faster deployment of new applications and services.
- Disaster recovery: Enhanced data protection and business continuity through cloud-based backups and redundancy.
- Focus on core competencies: Offloading IT management to cloud providers allows businesses to concentrate on their core operations.
Use Cases:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Migrating servers and storage to a cloud platform for greater flexibility and scalability.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): Moving applications to a cloud-based development environment for faster time-to-market.
- Software as a Service (SaaS): Adopting cloud-based applications like Microsoft 365 for improved collaboration and productivity.
- Disaster recovery: Utilising cloud-based backup and recovery services for business continuity.
Key Components:
- Assessment: Evaluating existing infrastructure, applications and data to determine migration strategy.
- Planning: Developing a detailed migration plan, including timelines, resources and risk assessment.
- Migration execution: Transferring data, applications and workloads to the cloud environment.
- Testing and validation: Ensuring the migrated systems function as expected and meet performance requirements.
- Optimisation: Fine-tuning cloud resources for cost-efficiency and performance.
- Security: Implementing robust security measures to protect data in the cloud.
