Planning for Cloud Migration ? Consider 6R’s Strategy

Is your migration to the cloud being a daunting process ?. Then its time to make it done in the right way to ensure it supports your business case and delivers the value that is expected since migration infrastructure, data and applications will affect both people and processes that rely upon them.

Planning is key to the potential successful migration to the cloud and you need to create a migration strategy by identifying the potential migration options, understanding the inter dependencies between applications, data and infrastructure.

Effective planning of cloud migration have 6 R best practices that enterprises are successfully practicing. But make sure to discuss these points with application/data owners to prioritize the assets to migrate with different strategies.

Rehost (Lift & Shift, Fork Lift) – simply ‘clone’ your servers and move them to the cloud provider’s Infrastructure. The Cloud Provider will then manages the underlying hardware and hypervisor infrastructure, and you continue to manage the same operating system and installed applications.

Repurchase – Many commercial applications are now available as Software as a Service (SaaS):Example Salesforce. So it may be easy to you move away from managing applications and infrastructure and adopt SaaS deployment model.

Replatform – Moving your application currently relying on legacy infrastructure to the new cloud based infrastructure. You are only changing underlying services, while maintaining the core application code, so the architecture of your applications will not change.

Refactor – Make changes to your application code to leverage cloud native services. Simply called “application modernization”. Example : It may be that you want to move away from server-based applications to leverage cloud provider serverless functionality

Retain – Your on-prem applications may be newly developed with newly invested money and other resources may not satisfy the business case to move to the cloud or the application dependencies with their software licenses may not yet support the public cloud platforms. So you will retain those applications back in on-prem.

Retire – You must classify what applications/infrastructure needs cloud migration and get rid of the aged/no business required assets. Simply retire the apps and infra instead moving them to cloud by spending time and cost.