Cloud migration is already mainstream. Studies show that at least 70% of businesses already migrated their workloads to the cloud. Since the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, metrics show growth in workload migration from on-premises to the cloud. While this trend may have started before COVID-19 as cloud-transformation initiatives, it was accelerated because of lockdowns and remote work setup. Companies are adapting to digital workplaces to deal with the increase in online demand, wherein cloud migration is the best solution to support this.
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What are the Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud?
3. Increased Agility and Flexibility
2. Migration of Large Databases
What are the Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud?
1. Scalability
Migrating to the cloud is most beneficial when it comes to scaling up/down to support the changing demands in workloads, i.e., elasticity. When an organization’s business expands, the capacity grows as well. A scalable cloud solution can deal with the sudden increase or decrease of workloads with minimal or negligible effects on the system’s performance, by auto-scaling the virtual computing resources that would otherwise be extremely challenging for traditional physical hardware.
2. Cost
In terms of maintaining and upgrading your IT infrastructure, cloud computing can be the most efficient. In cloud computing, the cloud service provider manages and maintains the assets such as hardware, and tools, including licensing and upgrades, then charges based on a utility model. Most cloud computing services are offering pay as you go (PAYG) pricing model. This means that you are subscribed to pay only for the features and services that you will be using, on-demand. For stable workloads, more savings can be realized by reserving or committing a budget upfront over a subscription term, most typically used in computing reserved instances (RI).
3. Increased Agility and Flexibility
Because all data are stored in the cloud, anything can be accessed anywhere and from any device. This can improve the performance of an organization by means of accessing systems and databases without the need to be in a physical office. Some examples include virtual desktops, cloud storage, collaboration services, online training, etc.
This can also open opportunities for a business to expand services and talent reach to the global market. Cloud computing offers agility and speed to develop new products, easier promotion to the market, and acknowledge customers’ demands. Since all of the work can be done remotely, this is a great opportunity to source skilled people across the globe.
4. Disaster Recovery
Cloud computing is also seen as beneficial to organizations in terms of disaster recovery. Having data stored on a remote cloud-based platform, it is more convenient for anyone to recover them than in a traditional disaster discovery. As long as you are connected to the internet, your data, applications, and other services can be accessed anywhere. This is a great help in minimizing the overall impact on a business in case of unplanned business continuity events.
What are the Challenges?
1. Data Security
One of the most common risks in migrating data to the cloud is a data breach. With so much information stored in the cloud, it is natural for organizations to be concerned about data leaks. One factor affecting this is the lack of security understanding by cloud teams which can result in poor encryption and weak data protection controls. This can cause possible data loss or accidentally expose confidential data.
Compliance is also an important aspect to consider in migrating confidential data. Before migrating your data, you must know and understand the encryption, backup, and transfer requirements that may apply to your data. Compliance requirements are different depending on the industry. Most of the service providers have compliance certifications for the common regulators such as PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, etc.
IT-Conductor is designed and built-in adherence to required security controls and compliance standards. IT-Conductor follows ISO 27001 which is the international standard for managing information security. This is essential in protecting employee and client information, furthermore, providing assurance of avoiding security threats.
2. Migration of Large Databases
Large data migration is considered one of the biggest challenges in cloud migration where a lot can go wrong. Databases will need to move to a different platform altogether in order to function in the cloud.
Given the circumstances, IT-Conductor can provide an automated solution for assessing, deploying, and migrating these large databases with lower risks in a standardized process. This automated approach can minimize the manual, error-prone, and labor-intensive effort of traditional migrations.
From migration readiness and planning up to the actual migration, IT-Conductor can be used to perform migration of large databases while keeping the monitoring intact just like what we did for IDEXX, one of our customers pioneering this automation initiative.
3. Potential Downtime
Moving your data to the cloud means a potential downtime risk for the business. This can mean that systems will not be operational all throughout the migrations and can have a negative return on investment (ROI) for enterprises due to potential loss of revenue.
Downtime and outages can be minimized with automation making the process more streamlined and quicker, thus minimizing business disruption. One of the best solutions that IT-Conductor provides in response to potential downtime management is the cloud-based Application Performance Management (APM) which automates the Observability of systems.
4. Cultural Change
When there are significant changes, employees also need to adapt to the new technologies implemented, however, most of the time, people tend to resist changes. Migrating to the cloud means possible changes in processes that may require employees to relearn and grasp new workflows. Training and upgrading skills are also major factors in moving to a new environment.
Most companies fear re-training and retooling their employees which can cause extra costs in their operations. Even though migration often involves a lot of teams, automating the process makes it more efficient.
IT-Conductor’s automated migration gives more time for employees to focus on other meaningful tasks rather than keeping an eye on typically long and complex migration processes.
Key Takeaway
Cloud migration is a challenging process that requires technical expertise to implement. Considering the great benefits of moving your databases to the cloud, challenges are unavoidable, but it doesn’t mean they are unsolvable. With the right strategy, planning, and having the right support from experts who knows how to handle these challenges, migration can go as smoothly as possible using effective and efficient automation.
IT-Conductor’s technical experts and cloud platform can guide and support your journey in migrating to the cloud end-to-end. The IT-Conductor platform is designed to automate the process to make the migration process streamlined using the 5Ds of IT-Conductor’s Cloud Migration Strategy (Discovery, Distill, Design, Development, and Deployment).
