In a public cloud migration process, IT teams need to be taken care of with a one-step approach in order to avoid the dreaded "system shutdown" event.
With many companies migrate to cloud-based infrastructure, IT teams need to ensure availability during the migration process. However, given the complexity involved, to prevent or minimize downtime cloud migration process is not easy. Cloud teams consider inconsistencies in the data, monitor different software version and check the network connection is successful.
If the enterprise application is disabled, then the business will be interrupted. Although the precise indicator of the company and due to the specific application will vary, but in 2014, Gartner found that the average cost of network downtime is $ 5,600 / minute. The high cost of downtime is also responsible for most companies often will they migrate workloads to other platforms (including cloud) one of the reasons.
Enterprise users are still expanding the range of applications to the public cloud a faster speed. Forrester Research predicts that by 2017 the global public cloud market will reach $ 146 billion, up from $ 87 billion in 2015.
See prospects
Choose to migrate to the cloud for businesses, future prospects are good and bad. Any cloud migration process is difficult. Mobile information needs to pay a lot of time and effort, even if the production system and the target system is fully compatible. Your cloud provider running the same system with the user for internal use system is very unlikely, it is difficult to cloud migration challenges grow exponentially.
On the other hand, today's computing infrastructure is more modular than in the past.
"Virtualization enables enterprises to more easily achieve workload migration between different systems," principal analyst at Forrester Research and infrastructure as a service private cloud head of Lauren E. Nelson said.
Virtualization creates an abstraction layer, so the software is no longer as in the past it depends on the system characteristics. Applications are no longer closely connected with the operating system, and often more dependent on which server resources are available. The disadvantage is that modern workloads typically large and complex. To achieve most of the features require hundreds of millions of lines of code above. In addition, its modular design means that they can interact with many other systems (such as identity management system used).
Where to start cloud migration process
All user applications and supporting infrastructure all at once moved to the public cloud is not feasible.
"If a large number of applications, the migration process need to spend six to twelve months," Nelson said.
The entire cloud migration process into manageable number of steps. From the smallest and simplest of the project started, and then the larger and more complex projects. During migration, internal and cloud deployment running in parallel computing systems, data synchronization and cloud deployment testing to ensure the migration process is not missing. In addition, all of the records in the cloud API in order to understand the migration process in which users need to monitor API.
When business users to map their original interface to a new interface, the key to success is in the details. For example, an application may run version 4.0 user interface, and cloud providers are using version 4.1, which is likely to include an application that does not support the functions and processes running on the system to prevent the crash.
Customization, network migration challenges faced
In the cloud migration process, the distinction between business services or custom applications to simplify operations will bring additional challenges. When rewriting enterprise applications typically create a rewrite software or add-ons. If cloud providers lack the software needed to support unique features, then this custom might cause problems.
Network communication is another important factor related to public clouds. When business users will migrate from the inside to the outside the information they need to make sure that the transmission speed WAN links fast enough to provide adequate performance. In some cases, this requires upgrading.
When migrating workloads to the cloud, enterprises will face many challenges, but public cloud providers offer related tools and services to simplify the cloud migration process.