7 Key Elements for a Successful Cloud Migration

Moving to the cloud can provide great benefits such as scalability, flexibility, and costs. However, cloud migrations are very complex, too. If you don’t plan and run your project carefully, you’re going to face delays, cost overruns, security issues, etc.

To successfully transition to the cloud, you need to get seven key elements right:

1. Clear Business Goals and Objectives

Before you start migrating to the cloud, the first thing to do is to define clear business goals and what you want to achieve. Many organisations rush into cloud transformations without aligning on the "why". This lack of strategic clarity causes problems down the road. 

Take time upfront to decide exactly why you want to migrate systems and workloads to the cloud. Challenge business and technology leaders to make you ask tough questions to discover why the move is occurring. Common goals of cloud migration services and solutions include reducing IT costs, gaining more flexibility to scale computing needs up or down, speeding product or service development, supporting overall business growth, improving system reliability and performance, and strengthening security. 

But don't just identify vague aspirations. Drill down to define tangible, measurable targets that clearly mark migration success, such as: 

• Reduce total IT infrastructure costs by 30%-40% within 2 years
• Ability to provision new compute capacity within minutes versus weeks
• Complete full system upgrades with no more than 1 hour of downtime
• Double the number of software releases per year
• Support 50% annual data growth without performance degradation
• Detect and patch critical security threats in less than 1 hour

These objectives create accountability. They guide tradeoff decisions through the migration process and implementation phases. Concrete goals also help secure buy-in and funding from executives and business leaders. 

The exercise of aligning on "why cloud and why now" sets the stage for an outcome-focused migration. It brings clarity of vision and commitment across the organisation - two fundamental ingredients for any technology transformation to propel business growth.

2. Methodical Planning

Cloud migrations are no exception and require detailed planning, like all successful IT projects. Crucial planning steps include:

Inventory of Existing Apps and Infrastructure

Before recreating your on-premises landscape in the cloud, you need full visibility into your existing on-premises landscape. Inventories covering all aspects of your business prevent nasty surprises down the road. 

Assess and Rationalise Apps

Not all apps make good candidates for lift-and-shift migrations. Assess each application’s cloud suitability, including:

• Usage patterns
• Performance and scalability needs
• Underlying technologies
• Security and compliance requirements
• Interdependencies with other systems

From here, you can categorise applications into phases – from “easy wins,” you can migrate quickly to “rehost” apps needing only minor tweaks for the cloud to “refactor” applications requiring more substantial re-architecting. Apps that never move to the cloud can be earmarked for retirement.

Map Dependencies

Catalog interdependencies between applications, data sources, and other ecosystem components. This mapping illuminates risks when moving systems and ensures proper sequencing of migration waves.

Define the Future State of Architecture

Decide which cloud platforms, infrastructure components, services, tools, and partnerships with reputable companies like Langate will comprise your future cloud environment. Map out how all the parts will interconnect to support your apps and workloads.

Mitigate Risks

Through the planning process, continuously assess technical, operational, security, regulatory, and other risks. Mitigation steps to address these known issues should be defined proactively. 

3. The Right Cloud Platform(s)

For migration success, the selection of the best cloud platforms and services for hosting your workloads is critical. A multi-cloud approach is most common as enterprises combine the best parts of various providers. 

Typically, forcing applications and entire IT environments into a single cloud doesn't end well. However, the needs of diverse apps and workloads are too different. The whole spectrum of what you need will probably not be available from one cloud service.

For instance, engineering teams looking to do cutting-edge development will prioritise the richest functionality, latest services, and global footprint for infrastructure hyperscale clouds like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud offer. If you’re more of a traditional business application kind of person, and you need your ERP or CRM systems, maybe that fits down better on the enterprise-grade cloud on IBM Cloud or Oracle Cloud, which is just really rock solid at running legacy stuff. 

Specialised cloud platforms designed with industry-specific apps and strict regulatory and data sovereignty constraints are better suited for healthcare, finance, government, and other verticals where industry-specific apps are at their best. Global companies need cloud services that allow them to locate data and compute capacity close to users across continents while maintaining unified visibility and governance.

To make the optimal cloud platform decisions, assess each of your key workloads across several dimensions:

• Technical requirements – Including compute, storage, network, latency, scalability needs, and more
• Ecosystem integration – Ease of connecting to existing DevOps toolchains, monitoring systems, identity providers, and other elements
• Data considerations – Regulatory constraints, sovereignty needs, access controls, and security specs
• Portability – Ability to shift workloads across cloud environments in the future to prevent lock-in
• Cost – Analysing consumption-based pricing models and available discounts

This level of evaluation requires a deep understanding of your application architectures, infrastructure interdependencies, security policies, compliance obligations, and other nuances. However, investing the time upfront to match each workload with the ideal cloud platform tailored to its needs sets your migration and cloud experience as a whole up for success.

4. Secure Network Connectivity

Users and apps won’t function in the cloud without reliable, high-performance network connectivity between your on-premises and cloud environments. Core components include: 

• Direct connect services: Dedicated, private connections from on-prem data centers to cloud access points provide higher bandwidth, lower latency, and more consistent performance than internet-based connections.
• VPN access: Encrypted virtual private networking is a flexible way to extend access to employees, partners, and customers.
• Transit gateways: These hub-and-spoke network architectures simplify interconnectivity between multiple VPCs, data centers, branch offices, and other locations.
• Load balancing: Distribute application traffic across multiple servers to optimise performance and meet surging demand.
• Web application firewall (WAF): Protect public-facing web applications from malicious attacks and excessive traffic spikes.

5. Automation and DevOps

Automating resource provisioning, app deployment, testing, monitoring, and management is critical for achieving cloud agility and efficiency. Core enablers include: 

• Infrastructure-as-code (IaC): Programmatically define cloud infrastructure components to speed provisioning across environments.
• Configuration management: Automatically install software, apply security patches, and configure system settings.
• CI/CD pipelines: Embed testing, validation, and deployment steps into automated release processes.
• Cloud-native tools: Adopt containers, microservices, orchestration, and other architectures tailored for dynamic cloud environments.
• Monitoring and observability: Gain end-to-end visibility into the health and performance of cloud-based apps and infrastructure.
• Cloud management platforms: These increasingly replace manual point solutions to unify visibility, governance, ops automation, cost controls, and more across multi-cloud estates.
  
  

  6. Cost Optimisation

  While the cloud promises cost savings, runaway expenses can quickly offset ROI. Tactics to better optimise cloud spending include: 

  • Assigning central accountability for usage, spend monitoring, and chargebacks
  • Right-sizing workloads based on utilisation data
  • Leveraging autoscaling to align capacity closely to demand
  • Setting up Cloud Spend Intelligence tools to identify waste and suboptimal resource usage
  • Taking advantage of preferred pricing models and discounts
  • Scheduling tasks to run when cheaper spot instance capacity is available
  • Deleting unused storage volumes, databases, and other resources
  • Architecting systems upfront for cost efficiency as a primary design principle

  7. Change Management

  Even with sound technology plans, people issues can still derail cloud migrations. To drive adoption and proficiency: 

  • Communicate early and often: Set consistent expectations about migration timelines, rollout phases, and impact on end users.
  • Train staff: Reskill teams on new architectures, admin procedures, monitoring tools, and cloud-native skillsets.
  • Incentivise agility: Adjust policies, processes, and culture from slow-moving legacy environments to cloud speed.
  • Clean data beforehand: Migrating bad data to the cloud multiplies problems. Take time upfront to cleanse, consolidate, and optimise data.
  • Validate early wins: Demonstrate success with pilot projects that showcase the cloud’s benefits without major business disruption.
  
  

The Path to Seamless Cloud Migration

If done right, migrating legacy systems to the cloud can transform customer experiences, products, operations, and economics. But it requires careful planning and execution across seven key elements: 

1. Clear business goals and objectives
2. Methodical planning
3. The right cloud platform(s)
4. Secure network connectivity
5. Automation and DevOps
6. Cost optimisation
7. Change management

Check all these boxes with your cloud migration programme, and you’ll be well on your way to migration success and unlocking the cloud’s full value.