A well-designed DevSecOps solution is the ticket to cloud success. Whether looking to optimize operations, reduce costs, or enhance scalability, an appropriately designed cloud migration plan is critical to your success. Without a strategy, you risk overlooking critical infrastructure needs, getting lost in a loop of iterative feedback, and running up costs before deploying your application.
Defining Cloud Migration
Cloud migration moves your organization’s infrastructure, applications, and data from on-premises hardware to the cloud. The migration process may be as straightforward as “lift and shift,” or transferring your applications directly from your servers onto cloud servers. Or, in instances where a direct migration is not possible or doesn’t make sense for your business, there are re-architecting or re-platforming options available that either modify your architecture or add additional services based on your needs.
In a recent survey of Price Waterhouse Cooper, 78% of business executives say that some or all of their tech needs are managed in the cloud. Cloud migration is driven by the need to reduce costs, modernize architecture stacks, and optimize architectures. However, with individualized architecture needs and a lack of clarity on the overall benefits of the cloud, cloud solutions are as varied as the businesses that need them. This variance leads to some common issues.
Avoiding Migration Pitfalls
Planning and assessment are critical aspects to ensure the success of any project. This is especially true when orchestrating a cloud migration. Dedicating time to planning and assessment creates the space to generate a successful migration solution.
Depending on the complexity of your project, migration to the cloud can be a complicated process and can bring about unplanned issues that can slow down your process or increase costs. A poorly managed migration can not only be expensive, it can also lead to severe issues including data loss, service disruption, and breaches in security.
A comprehensive assessment plan avoids these issues during the initial migration and the management of additional deployments.
Some key items to consider while assessing your migration strategy:
- Organizational objectives
- Risk mitigation
- Resource management
- Security needs
Organizational Objectives
Your assessment of objectives should include both overall goals and the goals you have for your cloud migration plan. If you want to reduce costs, develop increased scalability, or improve collaboration, your objectives should be central to your planning process.
Working with objectives in mind provides you with a north star throughout the planning process, giving you a guideline for any decisions.
Risk Mitigation
Your assessment process should include an overview of any potential risks - both those that may occur due to the migration and any existing risks. These risks should include security considerations, compliance requirements, and uptime needs. Creating an inventory of all potential risks develops a framework of guidelines for any infrastructure decisions.
Planning with risks in mind lets you avoid serious problems that can delay or damage your deployment.
Resource Management
Another consideration during the planning phase of your cloud migration strategy is your existing resources, including your data stores. A resource management plan includes ensuring that any existing data and services are safely moved to the cloud. It also includes plans for replacing existing services, if needed.
Defining needed resources and their management provides you with the added assurance that none of your existing resources or data are lost in the move.
Security Needs
The planning stage also includes an assessment of security needs. This assessment includes a look at any compliance considerations, potential security threats, or internal safety practices. Your plan should keep a list of critical security needs at the forefront of your migration.
Assessing security needs creates a blueprint for cloud infrastructure to ensure that your organization’s migration to the cloud does not create any security issues.
DuploCloud Leads the Way in Planning
DuploCloud’s first stage of the cloud migration plan is Discovery. During this phase, your dedicated DuploCloud team reviews all of your infrastructure needs and creates a comprehensive plan before deployment.
During the Discovery phase, your DuploCloud team requests access to your existing infrastructure. As they review your architecture, they note the potential for a “lift and shift” approach or make recommendations for re-architecting or re-platforming your infrastructure. At this point, your DuploCloud team will also consider your high-level requirements and business needs. We will review your existing software, hardware, microservices, and security needs to develop a high-level application architecture.
As we create a test environment and additional deployment, DuploCloud continues to assess your business needs. Through an iterative process, your dedicated team will work to cut down on costs, security issues, and other common cloud migration challenges.
Working with DuploCloud provides dedicated cloud migration assessment services that form the basis of your migration strategy and define the long-term support strategy DuploCloud provides. Our team flags all potential pitfalls and issues before developing your architecture, streamlining the entire process. Get started on the cloud migration assessment that will support your DevsecOps solutions with DuploCloud.
