Cloud migration: From on-prem to on-point

Your comprehensive guide to understanding the what, why, and how of cloud migration to accelerate your digital transformation journey

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In today’s fast-paced, digitally driven world, cloud spending is no longer an option but a necessity for businesses wanting to stay competitive and agile. According to Gartner, more than half of IT spending will have shifted to the cloud by 2025. However, for those who are still planning this move, migrating to the cloud can be a daunting task involving a magnitude of factors and considerations. 

The what: What is cloud migration?

Cloud migration is the process of moving data, applications and other business systems from an on-prem infrastructure to a cloud-based or hybrid infrastructure. This can be a complex process that requires careful planning and execution, but the benefits can be significant.

The why: Why your business should embrace the cloud

Overall, cloud migration is an exciting development that is transforming the way businesses operate. By embracing the cloud, businesses can stay at the forefront of scalable innovation and take advantage of the many benefits that this technology has to offer.

With the cloud, businesses can access cutting-edge technology and resources that were previously unavailable or too expensive. They can also benefit from automatic updates, improved collaboration, and the ability to scale up or down based on their needs.

Take a look at the benefits your business can reap from cloud migration:

• Agility: The cloud enables businesses to quickly adapt to new business opportunities, market changes and customer demands by providing faster and more efficient development, testing, and deployment of applications.
• Collaboration: The cloud also allows businesses to collaborate more effectively with partners, customers and suppliers, by providing easy and secure access to shared resources, applications and data.
• Cost savings: Cloud migration can help businesses reduce their capital expenditures on hardware, software and infrastructure, as well as lower their operating expenses on maintenance, upgrades and personnel.
• Disaster recovery: Cloud computing can provide businesses with robust and reliable disaster recovery and business continuity solutions, which in turn helps them quickly recover from disruptions and minimise downtime.
• Flexibility: Cloud migration gives businesses the ability to work from anywhere, at any time, on any device, as long as there’s an internet connection.
• Innovation: Cloud migration can provide businesses with access to advanced technologies and services, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics, all of which can help them innovate and create new value for their customers.
• Scalability: Cloud computing enables businesses to easily scale their resources up or down to meet changing demand and avoid overprovisioning or underutilisation of resources.
• Security: Cloud providers typically offer high levels of security and compliance that can help businesses improve their data protection, risk management and regulatory compliance.

The how: How to migrate to the cloud 

Migrating to the cloud can seem like a daunting task, but with the right planning, partner and execution, it can be a smooth and successful process. We’ve outlined a few key steps necessary in your successful journey to the cloud, take a look:

• Security and compliance: Considering your security and compliance frameworks from the start often helps establish whether your initial migration plan is viable or not, and if so, in which direction. For this reason, we often advise understanding these two fundamentals upfront.
• Portfolio discovery and planning: Next, you need to know everything that is running in your current environment and what the dependencies are. Armed with this information you’ll be in a better position to decide what to migrate first, and then work on how you’ll actually move it. At BBD, we offer Well-Architected Reviews of your environment, assessing the five pillars of a well-architected application: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency and cost optimisation. Additionally, we review your current cloud environment to validate if it’s built to best practices, identifying any potential risks that may require addressing.
• Migration strategies: To begin planning your architecture in earnest, you’ll need to understand and plan how your migration team will handle each application throughout your migration journey. Here you’re shifting your focus from a portfolio level to an individual application level.

The 6 core cloud migration strategies (the 6Rs):

• Operations: Often forgotten are the operational changes that you have to make – and what impact these have on your business. This is not about changing what you do, just how you do what you do.
• Minimise downtime: Downtime can be a significant challenge for businesses, leading to a loss of productivity, revenue, and customer satisfaction. That’s why it’s essential to minimise downtime as much as possible.
• Get the right team in place: With extensive expertise creating scalable, reliable and secure solutions in the cloud, we are an experienced cloud enablement partner for businesses looking to move and leverage all the benefits cloud computing has to offer.

Here’s a couple tips and tricks we’ve learnt along the way on how to minimise downtime:

• Make use of tools which allow you to maintain normal business operations throughout the replication process while you migrate. This limits performance impact while you simultaneously move operations to the cloud.
• Ensure that your launched instances are operating properly before decommissioning your source servers.
• Make use of routing services and capabilities to manage what environment your users will connect to during our migration. This helps ensure no disruptions or break in what your users are viewing.

The proof is in the cloud: Once you migrate to the cloud, you’ll see that the benefits are huge!

At BBD, we’re passionate about helping businesses succeed in the cloud. Our team of experts have years of experience in cloud computing, and we have helped businesses across industries migrate to the cloud, optimise their infrastructure, and achieve their strategic goals. But don’t just take our word for it – let us show you some real-world examples. 

Enhancing capital investment planning and prioritisation with a rapid system migration to AWS

When a diverse advisory consulting service provider specialising in capital investment planning, financial appraisals, data analytics, and data visualisation needed to assess and optimise their current system and push their service capabilities using the cloud, they turned to us.

Objectives

• Migrate the system to an AWS cloud environment
• Better facilitate expansion into new markets and geographies
• Increase efficacy of the existing software
• Improve technical reliability
• Increase system scalability
• Increase system security by leveraging off AWS’ existing security products

Approach

We started by performing an analysis of the client’s data centre hosted system infrastructure configuration, identifying areas of over and underutilisation. Based on the analysis outcome, we then optimised the required system environments in AWS and migrated the UAT system environment into AWS as a pilot to be used for testing over four weeks.

After the successful pilot, the client’s live environment was migrated into the AWS cloud, and within two weeks of migration, the data centre-based system environment was decommissioned. As a result, the client’s system achieved greater stability and reliability, and they were able to scale their service capabilities to meet their business needs.

When asked about the success of BBD’s migration of their tool, the client stated that:

“By choosing BBD and AWS, we have been able to upscale our system so we can equip clients in the public sector to make the right choices when it comes to choosing and implementing infrastructure projects. Partnering with a company that has global reach, a range of experts and capacity to respond to rapid scaling demands is reassuring, and future-proofs our growth strategy.”

Implementing an Azure cloud solution for a leading insurance platform

Check out how we developed a state-of-the-art collection platform on Microsoft Azure 👇

We have a wealth of case studies showcasing our expertise in cloud migration and optimisation, as well as other areas of technology. If you’re interested in learning more about how we’ve helped our clients achieve their business goals and how we can help you achieve yours, click here to read more. 

If you’re looking to migrate, modernise or manage your cloud, book your free 30-minute consultation with our experts 👇