5 Steps to an Automated Cloud Migration

Automated Cloud Migration

Pursuing an automated cloud migration strategy can help you accelerate your journey to the cloud, reduce the cost and headcount required to execute a migration and ensure that the cloud migration is actually successful.

Cloud migration without careful planning could land you in serious trouble

Survey respondents report that:

  • 55% stated they lacked clearly defined business objectives for cloud migration
  • 44% accepted that lack of planning affected the cloud migration execution
  • 49% of businesses delayed cloud deployments slip due to a cyber security skills gap.
Automated Cloud Migration Requires An Understanding Of Data and Application Complexity and Architecture

On-demand capacity and pay-as-you-go pricing are transforming cloud services to the next level by offering improved flexibility and agility than traditional models. Enterprises need to consider existing IT infrastructure requirements and assessment so that new cloud platform migration can meet the enterprise prerequisites. The below mentioned 5 steps approach can help to migrate enterprise workloads to the Cloud with zero business disruption.

1. Determine your existing environment with Automated Discovery
    • Evaluate infrastructure and resources
    • Understand the current data storage needs
    • Identify the usage base
    • Determine network configurations
    • Plan to move the enterprise’s compute, network, and storage to the new environment
    • Outline the current security postures and its inference for your future business goals
2. Plan Your Cloud Migration Strategy
    • Formulate proof-of-concept model that helps you to know the real costs of operating in the cloud
    • List the workloads you consider moving to the cloud
    • Plan how existing infrastructure and third-party solutions can be mapped out in the cloud
    • Plan to set up expected systems in the cloud, but prior to that ensure they are quantified and tested so that they can easily cope up with the cloud environment
    • Calculate the cost of three components compute, storage, and networking
    • Find the tools for data syncing and replication that helps to carry out the movement of data
    • Identify the right tools to carry out the migration
    • Select the cloud model that works best for your enterprise workload
    • Formulate the cloud professionals team who can best manage the transition
    • Understand the service level agreements, capacity planning strategy, and the flow of data for application is being monitored
    • Have a backup plan for abrupt situations during the migration
3. Fence Your Security Concerns Before Making Any Move To The Cloud
    • Perform a gap analysis to understand how cloud can change your security paradigm
    • Outline the security concerns and impose a central security strategy to curb unsafe activities
    • Setup security guidelines and control parameters
    • Set up additional security tools
    • Make sure you have appropriate policies and methodology in place for your future cloud environment
4. Execute An Automated Cloud Migration
    • Formulate the backup point for your existing servers and data to avoid data loss
    • Lift and Shift is not a viable option for ongoing maintenance, as you need automated rebuilding of environment for each software release and security patch update, setting up automation migration is preferable
    • Setup the cloud environment and proceed with migration
    • During the deployment ensure the provisioning, connections, and testing of individual components
    • Migrate your existing data to the new cloud platform to keep the business process active
5. Automate Application Modernization
    • Decide which applications you will want to manage with your DevOps and CI/CD processes
    • Choose a standard infrastructure as code approach (Terraform, Azure Resource Manager, AWS CloudFormation, Google Cloud Deployment Manager)
    • Automate the process of creating this infrastructure as code for your applications and your application infrastructure across your entire stack

Cloud platforms allow enterprises to iterate faster than they could have performed with their complex data center infrastructure. Matilda Cloud can help enterprises to identify the required infrastructure (servers, storage, network) for the target cloud environment and take advantage of the myriad benefits of the Cloud migration for better result.

On the other hand, evaluating the cost of cloud providers to determine suitable workload  environment for enterprise is essential. In addition, identifying the best way to run test for cloud deployments and track the workload performance in the cloud is imperative too. Thus, it’s a time-consuming process to find one-stop destination for your Cloud solutions requirements which is challenging as well. However, Matilda Cloud makes it easy for you. Matilda Discover automates finding your applications and their dependencies, and Matilda Migrate automates the creation of landing zones, the migration process, and the application modernization process. Request a demo to experience the new age of cloud migration practices.