Cloud migration can provide your business with cost-effective, innovative solutions and a better user experience. It helps companies improve performance and productivity in the workplace, but it does come with its own set of challenges.

For this reason, integrating security measures in cloud migration plans is important so that you protect your cloud infrastructure against risks. We’ll discuss how you can tailor a lucrative cloud migration strategy to your business needs.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is a Cloud Migration Strategy?

The transition from an on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-based environment is commonly known as cloud migration. To implement the transition, a cloud migration strategy is devised, outlining the workflow of activities involved in moving digital assets, services, and applications.

According to a 2020 report, 61% of businesses migrated to a cloud infrastructure to increase organizational performance. Following 2023, another report suggests that 60% of corporate data is now stored in the cloud, and nearly half trust the cloud framework to maximize data security.

Besides helping businesses manage the cost of consumption, cloud migration allows an organization to better meet customer demands. It can be tailored to suit business requirements, taking into consideration factors like the work environment, resource segregation, potential obstacles, and other such dependencies.

Components of Cloud Migration Strategy

A cloud migration strategy will generally consist of multiple processes:

  • Refactor: In this process, changes are made to current workloads, and technologies are applied to host the information in the cloud effectively. The process can include restructuring data, remodeling the architecture, or rewriting code.
  • Re-platform: In this process, all the applications use the existing cloud architecture and code while moving to a new cloud computing platform. A good example is integrating cloud migration to Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services.
  • Repurchase: This activity is a part of rebuilding or re-platforming in which businesses move to a new SaaS model of the product. An example is when you have to move on-premises applications and services to a SaaS ERP or CRM.
  • Rehost and relocate: In this process, you can move workloads to the cloud without making any changes to your data. Though it is a fast process, there are times when a workload may not operate the same in the new cloud architecture.
  • Retain and retire: When legacy applications take too much time and effort to rebuild or refactor, you may retain the resources in their current environment or remove them from the source environment.

How to Integrate a Cloud Migration Strategy

Identify Your Business Goals and Requirements

By identifying business goals, businesses can stay agile so they can successfully adopt new technologies and adapt to opportunities and challenges. Whether you’re moving from one cloud platform to another or adopting a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environment, your migration strategy must align with your needs.

You can start with a cost-benefit analysis, compare the pricing structures of different cloud platforms, and find ways to reduce cloud economics. For instance, startups that migrate into the cloud for the first time can spend less on hardware and software.

Plan and Evaluate the Migration

Transitioning to a cloud environment begins with an understanding of your baseline situation. You can use existing infrastructure to get a clearer picture.

Analyze the volume of data generated and stored daily as part of routine operations so you can begin planning the cloud migration. You must evaluate the machine data to get a comprehensive inventory of applications, supporting technologies, and servers.

While planning the migration, you’ll need to correlate the data against key metrics to get full-stack visibility. This allows you to feed more details into your cloud migration strategy, helping you access the scalability levels of the cloud transformation.

Monitor Performance of Applications

You must deploy tools for tracking low-level resources (e.g., disk, CPU, network, and storage) that power your organization’s applications. This gives you insight into the base system’s performance, responsiveness, and errors. Additionally, you can collect and review the information around the organization’s current infrastructure and configuration. When you combine your observations with application performance monitoring, it becomes easier to detect anomalies and identify over or under-provisioning issues.

Validate and Update Cloud Security

Protecting applications and their data is a vital part of an effective cloud computing environment. When migrating to the cloud, you must ensure your data remains secure during the transition, especially when migrating large workloads.

As per research, 81% of respondents claim that data security is a major challenge when it comes to cloud migration. With proper insights, you can address security violations like phishing, data breaches, exfiltration, or gaps in the system.

Once you’ve moved your resources, applications, and services to the new cloud environment (multi-cloud, public, private, or hybrid), you can set up necessary measures and safety protocols, like building a firewall, to ensure data security and integrity.

You also need to think about how end users will access newly minted cloud resources. So if the majority of your team will be harnessing personal devices to draw down data and run apps in the cloud, rolling out one of the best 15 mobile device management software solutions as part of your security push could be necessary.

Ensure Cloud Governance or Compliance

Cloud governance is the practice where an organization must stay compliant with regulatory standards applicable to cloud computing. Since existing rules can change, it’s important to stay updated with new laws and practices. If an organization fails to keep up with the regulatory requirements, it may cause serious legal implications. An organization’s cloud architect or third-party vendor is accountable for ensuring machine-driven compliance.

For instance, when you move your infrastructure onto Microsoft Azure or integrate a multi-cloud environment, your business resources and assets must adhere to the cloud platform’s requirements and regulations.

Identify and Establish KPIs

When you make your way from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-based environment, it’s essential to track necessary key performance indicators. Such parameters help evaluate current trends, address operational outlays, and track the progress of the cloud migration process. For instance, to focus on scalability and flexibility, you might want to analyze KPIs that indicate cloud capabilities.

Whether business-oriented metrics or technical indicators, the only way you’ll know a function is performing well is through careful evaluation. Identifying these KPIs should be an immediate initiative so you can rate the user experience, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of the cloud infrastructure.