In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, cloud migration has become a pivotal strategy for businesses aiming to enhance agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. However, the path to successful cloud migration process is fraught with challenges and complexities. This article will guide you through the essential elements of a robust cloud migration strategy, share insights into NATEK approach to cloud migration, and highlight the benefits experienced by our clients through real-world case studies.
Four key elements of good cloud migration strategy
If your organization decides to migrate the on-premises infrastructure to the cloud or it is considering the change of a cloud provider, you have to be aware of the fact that there is no universal solution. Every infrastructure and business differ, requiring a tailored approach to address unique challenges and leverage specific opportunities given by cloud platforms.
It’s essential to conduct a thorough assessment of your current environment, carefully plan the migration process, and continuously optimize your operations to ensure a smooth transition and maximize the benefits of migration to cloud infrastructure. Hence the four elements, that we’ll describe later, are:
- Discover & assess
- Plan
- Migration process
- Operate and optimize
At NATEK, our Cloud Experts always strive to understand and address the distinct needs of your business by designing a customized cloud migration strategy that will drive the efficiency, scalability, and innovation of your environment.
Our strategy planning consists of multiple steps that are crucial for the final result of the project. Get to know them!
DISCOVER & ASSESS
High-level overview of the inventory
This involves identifying all hardware, software, and network components to ensure a complete and accurate view of your current IT environment, and infrastructure.
Application readiness assessment
Evaluating the readiness of your applications for the cloud is crucial. This includes assessing their compatibility, performance, and potential need for modifications to ensure they function optimally when it comes to cloud environments.
Identification of company goals
Verifying the strategy and defining long-term goals (such as removing technological debt from the current server rooms), is crucial to understanding the needs of your business. Only then can we start building the business case, as well as writing it down into use cases. This approach ensures that cloud adoption supports business objectives and delivers measurable benefits.
PLAN
Setting up roadmap for cloud migration
Creating a detailed roadmap based on the business case outlines the stages of the migration process. This includes timelines, milestones, and key activities to ensure a structured and efficient migration journey, where every detail is addressed, and no step is omitted.
Ensure resource capacity
Assessing and ensuring adequate resource capacity is crucial. This involves determining the human, financial, and technological resources required to support the migration and post-migration operations.
Developing particular strategy for applications and infrastructure
Crafting a tailored strategy for migrating applications and infrastructure ensures that each component is handled according to its unique requirements, maximizing efficiency and minimizing disruptions.
7Rs of cloud migration
As cloud computing gains popularity, the 7R model of migration strategies has become increasingly relevant. At NATEK, we offer a comprehensive range of these strategies to suit your organization's specific needs. Check out the graphic below to explore the different types of cloud migration strategies we can provide for your project. Learn about the pros and challenges of each strategy and discover when to use them for optimal results.
MIGRATION PROCESS
Implement DevOps
Incorporating DevOps practices enhances the efficiency and reliability of the migration process. This involves workflow automation, continuous integration, and uninterrupted delivery to streamline the deployment and management of applications in the cloud. Thanks to this, it is possible to create a common level of automation for the source and target environments. Once a DevOps process that can handle both the old and the migrated application has been created, functionalities can be iteratively transferred from the old system to the new one.
Strategy execution
This stage is driven by the information and decisions made during the planning phase. Strategies can be executed iteratively or through targeted approaches. For instance, moving an application using the lift-and-shift method is less resource-intensive than rewriting it. These paths can sometimes run concurrently, but in other cases, a specific sequence is necessary due to the interdependencies between applications.
Migration of the data and application
Executing the actual migration of data and applications involves transferring them from on-premises environments to the cloud. This step requires careful planning to ensure data integrity and minimal downtime.
OPERATE AND OPTIMISE
Monitor, operate and continuously improve
Post-migration, it is essential to operate the cloud environment effectively and continuously seek opportunities for improvement. This involves regular reviews and adjustments to optimize performance and cost-efficiency. Additionally, we continuously monitor the solution in order to maintain performance, security, and compliance of your cloud resources. This involves using monitoring tools to track usage, detect anomalies, and respond to issues promptly.
Improved resiliency
One of the key benefits of migrating your infrastructure to the cloud environment is its scalability and high availability, which provides significant value to your business in multiple ways. Primarily, it ensures that your systems can handle increased workloads and user demands without compromising performance. This capability enhances your business's failure resistance, and resilience allowing you to maintain continuous operations and avoid downtime even during peak usage periods. Additionally, the cloud's scalability and high availability supports future growth, enabling your infrastructure to expand seamlessly as your business evolves and grows.
Cloud Migration with NATEK
A well-crafted strategy is essential for a cloud solution to deliver both time and budget savings. However, the strategy must also be effectively implemented and closely monitored. At NATEK, we adopt a holistic approach to the solutions we offer.
This ensures that whether you are just beginning your cloud journey or seeking support for an existing infrastructure, we can provide exactly what your business requires. Explore the case studies below to see how our approach translates into tangible results, and what are the real benefits of cloud migration.
Case study | Cloud migration for Health Tech customer
The customer, a large medical devices producer, has been seeking help to transform existing EOL infrastructure, spanning 2400+ servers across 80+ locations. The key goals were to reduce the footprint of on-prem infrastructure to minimum with cloud-first strategy, reduce remaining on-prem footprint to 3 main DCs and achieve zero or near-zero downtime migration for business-critical applications.
As the customer recently closed series of acquisitions and mergers, an extensive discovery and planning phase was required to prepare a complex solution to identify obsolete workloads required for decommission, re-platform or replacement with cloud and IaaS/PaaS solutions and rehosting remaining assets into a new DCaaS solution.
At NATEK, we managed and executed a comprehensive infrastructure discovery and identified more than 500 applications that needed a new hosting solution. As first milestone, we identified retirement and EOL targets, reduced remaining footprint to less than 1200 unique servers, subsequently we planned migration waves:
- Cloud – re-platform to Azure;
- AVS - extend on-prem WAN via Express Route to Azure VMware Solution cloud and re-host and retain as-is;
- build a new DCaaS solution and consolidate 80+ locations into 3 DCs for business-critical workloads required to stay on-prem.
We've built an AVS node to facilitate zero and near-zero downtime migration from on-prem into cloud while retaining the same IP/DNS and managed the overall procurement and RFP process with vendors supplying new on-prem hardware as DCaaS solution.
Case study | Integration and deployment for digital security leader
Our client, a leader in digital security, has been providing services in the telecommunications industry to manage and secure SIM cards. Due to increased demand on the market, the client was seeking to establish a dedicated team of Integration Engineers who will seemingly integrate the software to the client’s infrastructure, automate the deployment and provide continuous support.
Once we grasped the needs of our client, and aligned all crucial matters for this project, we established a Managed Team. The team consisted of Integration Engineers specialized in more than 20 technologies, and Project Managers specialized in PMP and ITIL 4.
Thanks to work of our Managed Team:
- We have decreased the time for installation and integration from 5 days to less than 1 hour. It was achieved by using Ansible software and by implementing automatic test and validation mechanisms like Gitlab-CI, Docker, or SoapUI.
- We have implemented a code pipeline (Infrastructure as a Code) that automatically builds the image with the product through CloudFormation, Lambda, and Ansible playbooks.
- We have adapted the product and the method of installation to customer needs.
Sum up
Cloud migrations are becoming increasingly popular among businesses worldwide. The primary drivers behind this trend are the cloud's flexibility and its ability to be perfectly tailored and customized for any given business. In this article, we explored the most important elements of cloud migration, offering a comprehensive overview of the entire process.
If you want to learn more or are ready to start a cloud migration for your company, NATEK is here to support you! Our personalized approach to meeting customers' needs across various industries —including banking, telecommunications, and Fortune 500 companies — enables us to deliver resilient, and secure cloud services, and solutions.
If you're looking for a team of experts to guide you through your cloud migration journey, contact us! Let’s explore the endless possibilities for development together. #growITwithus
We wrote this article in collaboration with Roman Łada-Grodzicki, NATEK Senior Lead Cloud Architect, who brings extensive expertise in cloud computing and cloud migration to help implement new solutions and enhance existing processes for NATEK customers.
