Cloud Migration

STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

www.qburst.com
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

WHY MIGRATE?

● Scalability to accommodate growing data requirements

● Business continuity and disaster recovery
● Faster development, iterations, and reduced provisioning time
● Improved IT resource management
● Improved cost management
● Collective IT Insights
● Data security
● Reduced carbon footprint
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

KEY CONSIDERATIONS

● Cloud vendor and type of cloud

● Cost structures - On-premise versus Cloud versus Hybrid
● Regulatory and compliance implications
● Security and data protection
● Backup and disaster recovery
● Portability: Ability to migrate or switch service providers easily
● Conformance with existing SLAs
● Skills required to build and operate a cloud environment
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

STRATEGIC ADVISORY SERVICE

Face-to-face Opportunities for cost

interviews with Architectural and capacity
business and IT assessment optimization

Adherence to
Assessment of cloud regulatory and Roadmap toward
operational maturity compliance target state
requirements - HIPAA,
PCI, SOC 1&2, GDPR

Identification of issues Migration to the cloud should be

Validation of business and possible risk approached in a phased manner,
case mitigation options ensuring minimal to no disruption
to operations.
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGY

What to migrate How to migrate Where to migrate

Prioritize the applications, Formulate a migration strategy Choose a reliable platform —
processes, and infrastructure to that aligns with needs and private, public, or hybrid — as
be migrated addresses potential risks appropriate for the business
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

DISCOVERY
Inventory
● Servers: Physical and virtual, hypervisor, OS, CPU, RAM, disk
● Software: All software assets, including end of life,
databases and websites
● Network devices: Switches, load balancers
● Storage: Devices and their logical partitioning

Validate current state and

inventory. Gain a 360 degree view
Dependency data
of infrastructure, applications, and
● Software dependencies — web, application, and database
their relationships
tiers, and clustered software configurations
● Containers and microservices
● Server-to-storage relationships to understand how the
data flows
● Hybrid application deployments
● Host-to-edge network relationships
● Hardware and software load balancing
● Disaster recovery setups
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

DECIDING THE APPROACH

● Lift and shift, minimizing changes, virtualization replatforming

Rehost
● Physical to virtual to cloud

● Lift, tinker, and shift. Initiate cloud optimizations.

Refactor
● Revise applications to leverage common services refactor

● Replace application with SaaS service

Rebuild ● Build cloud native application with similar/improved characteristics and
features

● Develop and productize common business and technical services

Revise ● Consolidate similar applications and services

● Move to more cloud‐aligned technology and platform services

Replatform ● Integration with cloud operations and monitoring replatform
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

PUBLIC, PRIVATE, AND HYBRID CLOUDS

Public Cloud Private Cloud Hybrid Cloud

Hardware, software, and other Services and infrastructure Combine on-premises

supporting infrastructure are are maintained on a private infrastructure or private
owned and managed by the network and the hardware clouds with public clouds so
cloud provider. and software are used organizations can reap the
exclusively. advantages of both.
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

PUBLIC, PRIVATE, AND HYBRID CLOUDS: PROS & CONS

Public Cloud Private Cloud Hybrid Cloud

● Lower cost ● Assures a high level of ● Better business
● Infinite space available security and privacy continuity/disaster recovery

● Offers access to advanced ● Improved efficiency and ● Cost savings for specific
technology control projects
● Easy to meet compliance ● Unique balance of control,
requirements performance, and scalability

● No control over ● Resource optimization is a ● Security complexities

infrastructure challenge ● Possible network bottleneck
● Data is vulnerable to thefts ● Hardware limitations lead to ● Difficult to maintain visibility
● Lack of customization capacity ceiling
● High cost
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

CHOOSING BETWEEN SINGLE AND

MULTI-CLOUD

Single Cloud Provider Multi-cloud Approach

● Development teams have just ● Run applications across

one set of cloud APIs to learn multiple cloud environments
● Application can benefit from (choose cloud based on the
the features offered by the capabilities of each provider)
chosen cloud provider ● Downside: Increased
● Downside: Vendor lock-in complexity
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

CLOUD NATIVE VS CLOUD AGNOSTIC

Cloud Native Cloud Agnostic

● Easy to set up ● Can be implemented on and

Attributes ● SaaS available for most tools moved between cloud platforms
● Easy integration ● Application templating

● No vendor lock-in
● Vendor-specific ● No unified API for calling cloud
Vendor lock-in ● Managed services computing services
● Only one set of APIs ● Dependent on in-house skillset

● Single management interface for

● Auto-provisioning monitoring and reporting
Business value ● Auto-scaling ● Availability of cloud-neutral tools
● Auto-redundancy such as Terraform and Ansible
● Security
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

PRIORITIZE MIGRATION COMPONENTS

Migrate your entire application at once OR

Migrate component-by-component or service-by-service

First For larger, complex applications Dependency diagram

Identify connections Use a monitoring application such as Decide which components
between services and New Relic APM that offers service should be migrated and in
interdependencies maps to generate dependency what order
diagrams

Start by migrating services that have fewer dependencies

Start with outward/customer-facing services/apps

CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

ESTABLISH PERFORMANCE BASELINES

Baselining is the process of measuring the current (pre-migration) performance of your application or
service in order to compare future (post-migration) performance.

● Set a baseline metric for each KPI that you’ve decided to measure
● Determine how long you will collect data to determine the baseline
● Choosing a short baseline period (such as a day) lets you move faster, but you risk not
collecting a representative performance sample
● Choosing a longer period to baseline (such as a month) obviously takes more time, but can
provide more representative data
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

ESTABLISH CLOUD KPIS

User experience Infrastructure

● Page load time ● CPU usage %

● Lag ● Disk performance
● Response time ● Memory usage
● Session duration ● Network throughput

Application/component performance Business engagement

● Error rates ● Cart adds

● Throughput ● Conversions and conversion %
● Availability ● Engagement rates
● Apdex
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

CLOUD MIGRATION APPROACH

Identify Workloads for

Migration

Health Check Migration Assessment

CLOUD
Tuning fsfsfsf
MIGRATION
Scheme & Code
Conversion
APPROACH
sf
Data Conversion &
Production Go-Live
Sync

Testing
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

CLOUD MIGRATION ROLLOUT

Beta Environment Setup

● Set up a beta environment of the existing environment

● Test/fine tune application using test data and test database
● Test scalability after loading production equivalent test data

Migration
● Build a new production environment
● Adopt DevOps practices
● Move production data and set up storage, DR, and fault tolerance
● Update DNS records and other configurations

Continuous Monitoring
● Set up monitoring tools
● Keep watching logs, performance, response time, and load
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

DATA MIGRATION BEST PRACTICES

● Use a bi-directional syncing mechanism between on-premise and cloud databases.

Once all consumers of the data are moved to the cloud, remove the on-premise
database.
● Use an on-premise database with one-way synchronization to a cloud-based
database, and allow consumers to connect only to the on-premise version. When
ready, disable access to the on-premise version so the cloud-based version becomes
the main database, and enable access for cloud-based consumers to the new
database.
● Use a cloud data migration service, such as those available from Amazon Web
Services and Microsoft Azure.
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

REVIEW APPLICATION RESOURCE ALLOCATION

● Resource optimization by dynamic allocation

● Cost efficiencies through architectural and component optimization
● Optimize cloud solution based on real-world data
○ Based on requirement, add H/A functionality to protect against outages, or right-size
instances to fulfill requirements at lowest cost
○ Start the monitor-optimize cycle
● Examine backup and disaster recovery policies
● Once all key goals have been met and cloud migration risks avoided, move the application
to its steady state
● Runbooks ensure everyone has the information necessary to keep apps running and
supported through the rest of their lifecycle
● Optimize customer experiences
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

SETTING UP A MIGRATION TEAM

Manager (Migrations) Architect (Migrations) Cloud Developer Cloud Security Specialists

● Knowledge of existing ● Responsible for ● Responsible for ● Responsible for

network, applications, designing the cloud developing and configuring and
and database architecture - deploying solutions managing security
management platforms, servers, on cloud platforms baselines
technologies. storage, content
delivery, and networks. ● Significant ● Designs and
● An experienced project understanding of manages a secure
manager with a sound ● An experienced core IaaS and PaaS cloud environment
understanding of how technology platforms.
technology fits into the professional with ● Certified in cloud
larger company significant experience security
strategy. in cloud migrations management

● Set up a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) in your organization with representation from various departments
including Architecture, Development, Security, Operations, Leadership, and Finance.

● Governance and Communication framework: Dashboards to track progress (Jira).

CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

CLOUD GOVERNANCE PLAN

Scope
Cloud governance plan involves:
● Decision making processes Stakeholders

● Criteria and policies involved in the

planning, architecture, acquisition,
Policies
deployment, operation and
management of cloud computing
capability
Governance
Processes Organizations
● Model formulation to cover security, Requirements
financial, performance, collaboration &
communication governance.
Tools
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

CLOUD GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK

Strategic Alignment
and Planning

Compliance, Security, and Risk Enterprise Requirements and

Demand Management

Enterprise
Program Management/PMO Sa Governance Prioritization and Focus,
and Execution mp Framework Investment Planning
le
tex
Sa
t
Resource Allocation and mp Portfolio Management,
Funding le Acquisition, and Legal
tex
t Business Enterprise
Architecture
CLOUD MIGRATION STRATEGIES & BEST PRACTICES

WHAT WE PROVIDE

● Expertise in a host of cloud services — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google
Cloud Platform
● Scalable and dynamic cloud architecture
● Multi-cloud security and tools experience
● Strong capabilities in pragmatic risk and compliance management
● Experience in cloud migrations
 14150 Newbrook Drive
Suite 115
Chantilly, VA 20151, USA
www.qburst.com