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Migration of corporate applications to the cloud

Cloud computing has become a crucial foundation to implementing digital transformation architectures and solutions. Leading cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform are innovating at breakneck speed and delivering services across the spectrum to meet the needs of every role in IT: operations, application development, and infrastructure support.

With the technology and business benefits provided, cloud computing has become the basis for digital business initiatives. It is now imperative for companies to develop cloud scenarios optimized for a digital strategy. Cloud computing will drive digital transformation like no other technology has done before.

Organizations across various industries, regardless of their size, are looking to migrate their applications to a cloud platform. See the full migration path from defining goals and objective to its final application launch in the cloud below:

Step 1: Situational analysis and goal setting for cloud migration

To develop the best strategy, it is necessary to determine the goals and priorities for cloud migration: Moving to the cloud may seem to be a purely technical decision, but it is a business decision as well.

To get a better understanding of the application portfolio and identify local applications and servers, it’s vital to first collect the following information about each application:

  • Application complexity 

  • Performance sensitivity or time of response to a query

  • Dependencies on other applications or components

  • Architecture: Monolithic, SOA, built on microservices, etc.

  • If there are any confidential transactions or data

  • Criticality for the business 

  • Additional benefits of migration to the cloud platform

  • Life cycle stages

  • Benefits from abandoning legacy applications

  • Data storage requirements

  • Infrastructure requirements

  • Compliance requirements

  • Safety requirements

  • Internal and external integration requirements

Step 2: Developing a strategy and migration planning

Develop decision criteria to determine which applications are easily migrated to the cloud and which aren’t.

Conduct a cost analysis on the following parameters:

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  • Operating costs of cloud services 

  • Application redesign and development costs

  • Application maintenance costs and professional support services

  • Transfer of capital investments into operating expenses

  • Savings on infrastructure load scalability

  • Savings on personnel optimization

Decide which cloud platform and migration methods enable you to optimize the application's contribution to the declared and intended business and IT goals.

Determine the best migration strategy for each cloud-ready application—IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, or FaaS.

Application migration strategies

Hosting transfer (rehost) IaaS: Lift and Shift

Redesign (rebuild)

PaaS, FaaS

This strategy involves moving the application to the cloud, including changes to the technology stack or to the application itself. It includes the migration of physical servers and virtual machines to the cloud platform without their modification. By simply switching your current server environment directly to IaaS, you can benefit from cost savings, security, scalability, and increased reliability.

This strategy involves cloud-based or legacy apps upgrades. Applications are rebuilt by using the services provided by the cloud platform (PaaS model). The strategy is built on a microservice architecture to ensure scalability, load balancing, security, and DevOps. For example, modernization of a logistics management system in the Cobol language using Angular, .Net core, and other cutting-edge software technologies.

Migrate to microservices

Refactor

PaaS, FaaS

Replace

SaaS

This strategy is also known as cloud optimization.

In this case, the current applications are deployed in an as-is format, with some minor changes to the application code or configuration. The strategy employs new cloud platform infrastructure services, such as containers, databases, servers, etc

“Replace” means the abandonment of an existing application (or set of applications) and its replacement with commercial software delivered as a cloud service to meet the necessary business requirements. In this case, a ready-made application solution isn’t created, but it can be customized and integrated. This allows users to access SaaS through a web browser or a mobile device.

Step 3: Cloud migration and infrastructure optimization

  • Set up the organization, processes, procedures, and tools that will be used to manage and monitor the environment.

  • Build the cloud infrastructure: 

  • Prepare, install and test the storage, computing resources, network, firewalls, and other resources to the cloud-based platform required for the migrated application.

  • Implement all integrations between cloud apps and other apps or resources.

  • Install additional utilities for business continuity and security.

  • Depending on your application portfolio, you can plan an iterative or parallel migration process.

  • Create a simulation of the migration. Do a test run of the migration project to identify unexpected results or issues unnoticed during the planning phase.

  • Optimize your entire migration management and process based on the experience of each of the migrations performed.

How we can help

Based on our extensive experience of migration strategies implementation, delivering a solution-driven approach, and simplifying the work of data analytics applications, Binary Migration delivers application speed and increased accessibility with the use of workload-specific tools. Binary Migration’s approach makes complex migrations easy and hassle-free. The highest priority given to the customer’s case, customer service and efficiency.

When an organization plans a cloud migration, it is critical to determine which cloud services model is best suited—public, private, or hybrid cloud—and the order in which applications and environments are migrated to the cloud. Migration of on-premises workloads to the cloud is beneficial in terms of cost savings, scalability, performance optimization, and regulatory compliance.

Binary Migration cloud migration expertise enables organizations to simplify the migration of different types of workloads across various infrastructure deployments. Our cloud migration services handle the entire lifecycle with ease and value. We offer a complete solution to transfer your business to the cloud so that you can start reaping the benefits of cloud infrastructure right away.

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