Migrating to the cloud has become a necessity for businesses to stay competitive. Moving data and workloads, however, is far more complex than it sounds. Mikhail Gloukhovtsev, Senior Cloud Solutions Architect at Orange Business outlines the key steps to consider for a successful cloud migration.
Find out more by signing up to our webinar on 13 September 2017 at 15hrs CET (Europe) or 9.30hrs SGT (Asia Pacific), which explores how to ensure a successful migration to the cloud.
Cloud migration is a big journey and if you haven’t mapped it properly, it can be a rough ride. With the right strategy, tools and expert knowledge, you can resolve unforeseen issues, streamline processes and build an IT environment that will support your digital business into the future.
Migration to the cloud isn’t as simple as picking up data and workloads and dropping them into the cloud. It is a demanding and complex process. The cloud environment must be optimized to reach pre-determined business goals.
We share five steps to navigating a safe path to cloud. Register for our webinar on 13 September 2017 at 15hrs CET (Europe) or 9.30hrs SGT (Asia Pacific) for a deeper dive into these issues and more.
1. Preparation is critical
Cloud migration is a huge undertaking and must be properly resourced. It is essential to identify business requirements and establish a framework for the migration. Preparation will include creating a taxonomy of existing applications, based on cloud readiness, to establish which applications can be optimized for the cloud, retired or earmarked to remain on premises. In addition, you should map cloud application dependencies as part of the risk evaluation process, to reduce the risk of failure.
2. Regulation and sovereignty
Data held in the cloud may be subject to the laws of more than one nation. You need to understand and comply with these laws. Both security and sovereignty should be high on your list when choosing a cloud partner and building your cloud infrastructure. For example, if you process EU residents’ data, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which becomes enforceable at the end of May 2018, must be factored into your cloud migration plans.
3. Containerization, data fabric and multiple cloud
The cloud journey doesn’t stop once you’ve migrated. It is one of continuous transformation, re-invention and innovation to retain your competitive edge. There are promising developments in using containers for migration between different clouds. Container technologies also offer unparalleled agility in developing and running applications in the cloud, particularly when linked with a micro-service architecture. Or take “data fabric” in relation to multi-cloud strategies. Data fabric enables data management for hybrid multi-cloud environments. This allow customers to develop and use flexible multiplatform and hybrid cloud application architectures.
4. Protect your data inflight
By choosing to store data in the cloud, you relinquish physical control over it, which makes securing the cloud infrastructure critical. Transferring data to the cloud safely and retrieving in when you want it are big challenges. The data being transferred, also known as data inflight, is vulnerable and needs to be encrypted to protect it against exposure from attack.
5. Synchronizing data across on-premises and cloud environments
Synchronization establishes consistency between systems. It also ensures future updates are consistent. To ensure flexibility to move between cloud and on-premises systems, you need technology and standards in place that support data portability. Data synchronization can either be a one-way sync, also referred to as mirroring, which pushes files from the source platform to the cloud or two-way synchronization, which pushes files in both directions. Whichever way, you need a solid synchronization plan in place.
Migrating to the cloud raises these issues - and many more questions. Selecting the best solution depends on the individual needs of the enterprise.
Find out how you can develop your cloud migration program and ensure the overall effectiveness of your cloud migration by joining our webinar on 13 September 2017 at 15hrs CET (Europe) or 9.30hrs SGT (Asia Pacific)
Mikhail is a Senior Cloud Solutions Architect at Orange Business (Philadelphia). He is one of the first 100 EMC certified ITaaS Cloud Experts worldwide and an expert in IT infrastructure solutions. Mikhail has worked in management teams with Fortune 500 corporations on global multimillion-dollar projects to design and implement IT service portfolio aligned with business goals. He has been a key contributor to the development of the SNIA ILM Maturity Model (http://www.snia.org) and published papers in the EMC Knowledge Sharing program (the best article on cloud computing in 2016 and the first place in 2017, https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-57848). Mikhail holds an M.Sc. degree in IT Management and Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry. Before moving to the computational industry, he published two books on Computational Chemistry and more than a hundred research papers in scientific peer-reviewed journals (citation h-index=37; i10-index=60, http://scholar.google.com, spelling: M.N. Glukhovtsev). Mikhail likes travel, jogging, medieval history, urban architecture, and history of economics.