Migration to the cloud is the process of transferring data, applications and services from the company’s local servers to the cloud environment or moving them between clouds. The cloud environment is provided by service providers — these are cloud providers.
With migration, an organization can optimize infrastructure maintenance and administration costs, increase productivity, flexibility and fault tolerance of the system, as well as increase the efficiency of geo-distributed teams and the level of information security of the company.
Stages of migration to the cloud
Evaluation. Identify all applications, data, and services that need to be moved to the cloud, and assess their readiness for uninterrupted operation in a cloud environment.
Planning. Choosing a cloud service provider and planning the entire process with the cloud provider’s specialists, including the migration procedure and the timing of its implementation.
Migration. Direct migration of applications, data and services to the cloud environment. Migration may require a short shutdown of systems to ensure data consistency.
Testing. After the migration is completed, the cloud provider’s specialists conduct testing to make sure that all systems work stably in the new environment.
Optimization. Configuring and optimizing applications for the cloud environment and monitoring performance.
The benefits of migrating to the cloud
Economic efficiency. Compared to the cost of maintaining local servers, cloud services reduce the cost of deploying and administering IT infrastructure.
Scalability. Depending on the business needs in the cloud, you can easily increase or decrease computing resources, for example, during peak loads (discounts, holidays or sales).
Business continuity. If the cloud is deployed in a secure Tier III data center, the risk of accidents is minimized, which virtually eliminates the risk of downtime and financial losses for the business.
Comfortable work. Data and services in the cloud are accessible from anywhere in the world where the Internet is available, which allows geo-distributed teams to work more efficiently regardless of their geolocation.